Portfolio Analysis of Layered Security Measures

Layered defenses are necessary for protecting the public from terrorist attacks. Designing a system of such defensive measures requires consideration of the interaction of these countermeasures. In this article, we present an analysis of a layered security system within the lower Manhattan area. It shows how portfolios of security measures can be evaluated through portfolio decision analysis. Consideration is given to the total benefits and costs of the system. Portfolio diagrams are created that help communicate alternatives among stakeholders who have differing views on the tradeoffs between security and economic activity.     

The Significance of Living Together and Importance of Marriage in Same-Sex Couples

Because marriage has been denied to same-sex couples, it is likely that the meaning and significance ascribed to non-marital cohabitation may be unique. Further, it is unclear whether same-sex couples view marriage as important to their relationships, and if they do, why. Using qualitative data from 526 individuals in cohabiting same-sex relationships across 47 states, we explored (1) the meaning and significance of cohabitation and (2) the perceived importance of legal marriage to the relationship. Participants viewed cohabitation as significant, most commonly because it indicates long-term commitment, provides emotional support, makes the couple a family, and allows them to share life together. Marriage was perceived as important to a majority (90%), most commonly because it confers financial and legal benefits, relational legitimacy, and demonstrates the same commitment as different-sex couples. Overall, findings highlight the symbolic significance of cohabitation and importance of access to legal marriage to adults in same-sex relationships.     

Disability, Eugenics and the Current Ideology of Segregation: a modern moral tale

Recently, an amalgamation of articles have appeared in a wide range of publications linking together community and school inclusion, and facilitated communication research as an unholy trinity of anti-empiricism eroding the disability fields. The authors of these critiques suggest that there exists a scientific basis for state institutions, segregated learning and a non-critical acceptance of traditional interpretations of expressive ability on the part of people with disabilities. In this article we expose not science, but an ideology of segregated control behind these claims. This ideology permeates the disabilityrelated professions and is cloaked in the language of the natural sciences. We trace this use of the natural sciences to the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century and explore the legacy of the ideology of control as it impacts current understanding of disability.     

Estimation of Stigmatized Characteristics of a Hidden Gang in a Finite Population

This paper considers the problem of estimating the size and mean value of a stigmatized quantitative character of a hidden gang in a finite population. The proposed method may be applied to solve domestic problems in a particular country or across countries: for example, a government may be interested in estimating the average income of victims or perpetrators of domestic violence. The proposed method is based on the technique introduced by Warner (1965) to estimate the proportion of a sensitive attribute in a finite population without threatening the privacy of the respondents. Expressions for the bias and variance of the proposed estimators are given, to a first order of approximation. Circumstances in which the method can be applied are studied and illustrated using a numerical example.     

The future from the top: Presidential perspectives on planning—Part Three

This is the third and final part of Dr. Rosen's article. In this part, the author draws his conclusions from the mass of data which was available to him and presents his philosophy of planning.     

POLITICAL COMPETITION WITH CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS AND INFORMATIVE ADVERTISING

This paper presents a theory of political competition with campaign contributions and informative political advertising. Policy‐motivated parties compete by selecting candidates and interest groups provide contributions to enhance the electoral prospects of like‐minded candidates. Contributions are used to finance advertising campaigns that provide voters with information about candidates' ideologies. Voters update their beliefs rationally given the information they have received. The paper uses the theory to analyze the welfare economics of contribution limits. Such limits are shown to redistribute welfare from ordinary citizens to members of interest groups. (JEL: D72, H40)     

Getting to the Top: Selection and Training for Senior Managers in the Police Service

This paper examines the processes by which the senior police officers in England and Wales are chosen and prepared for their role. Based upon research interviews with a sample of chief constables and assistant chief constables, it develops a critical assessment of the quality of each of the three key stages in this respect: the selection of those considered to have the potential to become senior officers, senior management training, and the appointments process at police authority level. In the light of the assessments made, the paper considers alternative schemes to those which currently operate at each stage of the process.     

The Significance of Shils

Edward Shils was a widely recognized but misunderstood thinker. The original contexts of his thought are not well understood and greatly distorted by associating him with the concerns of Parsons. Shils provides a fully comparable alternative to the thought of Habermas and Foucault, with essentially similar roots: practice theory, the dissolution of Marxism in the twenties, and Carl Schmitt. Though Shils was indebted to the American sociological tradition, with respect to these issues his sources were outside it: in Hendrik de Man, T. S. Eliot, and Michael Polanyi. It is shown how Shils responded to Schmitt's argument about the inherent conflict between democracy and liberalism in terms of an account of civility and tradition, and how this argument results in a critique of Foucault, Habermas, and collectivistic liberalism.     

A PLAGUE ON THE PANOPTICON: Surveillance and power in the global information economy

With technological advances in data-manipulation, the increased 'informability' of our daily lives and the potential for social management, surveillance has become a key site for understanding the workings of power within the global informational economy. Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon has, courtesy of Foucault, become a dominant metaphor in surveillance studies. This central eye, aimed at the moral reform of institutionalized bodies and operating through a de facto closure of individual agency, tends to limit our conception of the complex ways surveillance serves and disrupts power. Through analysis of commercial and workplace surveillance, this paper shows that power is contested and agency never completely closed down. To comprehend this negotiated relationship, an alternative framework - 'plague management' - is presented. This envisions surveillance within a social setting operated by multiple agents who themselves are open to the gaze of those surveyed. The aim of this project is to categorize rather than to reform and cure, and moreover space is available for resistance. On the global scale, new technologies have opened up space for informal, local surveillances to be effectively linked to media and Internet audiences. These 'surveillance networks', informal alliances of a variety of actors, have the potential to radically alter orthodox relations of power by evading the information controls of the state and connecting a local gaze with the global community. This paper concludes that although surveillance studies has rightly been concerned with the control capacities of IT, a balance must be actively sought with the facilitative, enabling and even democratic impulses nascent in the new technology.