News - Schemes don’t just cut crime rate
| Neighbourhood Watch schemes are seen as a vital way to cut crime in lincoln national life insurance, but can also help residents in other ways.
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Children Whose Parents Smoked Are Twice As Likely To Begin Smoking Between 13 And 21
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Science Daily &
Co-authors of the study publishedin the current issue of Journal of Adolescent Health are J. DavidHawkins, UW professor of social work; Richard Catalano, UW professor ofsocial work and director of the Social Development Research Group;Robert Abbott, chairman of educational psychology at the UW; and JieGuo, a former UW research scientist. Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by University of Washington.
Read more on Children Whose Parents Smoked Are Twice As Likely To Begin Smoking Between 13 And 21 |
News - Half-yearly fraud figures soar
| Read more on News - Half-yearly fraud figures soar Fraud is soaring in Scotland with figures for the first six months of this year already topping the total for 2003, according to a new survey. The value of fraud reported up to the end of June was 8.51m - compared with the total of 7.21m reported in the whole of 2003. The biggest homeowners crime insurance company are management and organised criminals, who account for more than half of all such crimes. The figures were published in the KPMG Forensics Fraud Barometer. It focuses on “major” fraud cases where the charges are more than 100,000. In Scotland there were seven reported significant fraud cases in the six months before 30 June this year, with a total value of 8,510,000. In the same period last year the number of cases reported was 11, although the value was just 3,043,077.
The Scottish figures buck the UK-wide trend, which has seen the total value of fraud cases reaching court fall to 71m in the first half of 2004 - down from 158m in the last six months of 2003. Included in the Scottish figures is a case relating to an action brought under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, legislation designed to confiscate criminal proceeds obtained through unlawful conduct, including fraud. The case involved charges being raised for 4m in respect of money national insurance number offences. The Fraud Barometer, published on Monday, revealed that 58% of fraud is committed by management and organised criminals. It says management takes advantage of having the “inside track” on a business’ workings while criminal syndicates exploit weaknesses in business controls. Robin Crawford, head of KPMG Forensic in Scotland, said companies had to remain vigilant to avoid becoming the victims of fraud.
He said: “The figures in Scotland clearly show that fraud remains a growing problem High threat
“No matter the size of the company, wherever there is a national insurance crime bureau of
“Once again, many of the frauds in our survey clearly demonstrate the need
“The threat of fraud remains high from both within and outside a business.
The report revealed local and national government were the biggest victims of
Financial institutions, such as banks and insurance companies, were also targets
In one case, three former bank messengers were caught taking 800,000 they
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Killing Wolves May Not Protect Livestock Efficiently
Science Daily — Costly and time-consuming efforts to eliminate wolves that prey on sheep, cattle and other domestic animals are ineffective on a long-term, regional scale, according to an examination of wolf control methods in Alberta and several U.S. states by University of Calgary national lloyds insurance company.
Results of the study were presented at an annual meeting of wolf scientists, ranchers and wildlife managers near Yellowstone National Park.
Lead author Dr. Marco Musiani, an assistant professor in the U of C’s Faculty of Environmental Design, said the findings could lead to changes in how ranchers and government wildlife authorities deal with problems relating to depredation of livestock by wolves.
Musiani said using lethal control to limit wolf numbers, and therefore curb depredation, requires 30 to 50 per cent of an area’s wolf population to be destroyed year after year. Instead, programs to compensate ranchers and shepherds for stock lost to wolves can be used to offset costs to producers. Such programs convey funds from numerous citizens concerned with nature conservation to the ranchers affected by livestock losses.
“Killing that many wolves would be difficult,” Musiani said. “If society wants to co-exist with wolves, it has to accept that there will be losses and address the real issue, which is that if ranchers lose some of their animals, or if animals are injured, it costs them money. There are also significant labour costs for increasing livestock surveillance to prevent attacks.”
In addition, livestock producers and wildlife officials could plan activities to prevent wolf attacks during the high-depredation seasons, which are described in the study.
Musiani and colleagues analyzed wolf attack national insurance recruiter from Alberta from 1982-1996 and in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming from 1987-2003. The data showed that the common practice of tracking down and killing wolves that prey on livestock did not result in decreased depredation rates regionally, or over the long-term. The study also found that wolf attacks appear to follow seasonal patterns that reflect the food needs of wolf packs and livestock calving and grazing cycles.
“This study shows that wolves are being killed as a corrective, punitive measure — not a preventative one,” Musiani said. “People hope that killing individual wolves that attack livestock will rid the population from offenders but this isn’t happening. It seems other wolves simply take their place and you have the same problem over and over again,” Musiani said. “To use a human analogy — by putting criminals in jail we are going to obtain a decrease in crime? In many cases, probably not.”
The paper “Seasonality and reoccurrence of depredation and wolf control in western North America” is published in the current issue of the Wildlife Society Bulletin and presented by Musiani at the18th Annual North American Wolf Conference at Chico Hot Springs Resort in Pray, Montana. The April 4-6 conference is sponsored by the Madison Valley Ranchlands Group, the Nez Perce Tribe, the Wolf Recovery Foundation, Yellowstone National Park and the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife. The study comes as several U.S. states consider removing the gray wolf from the federal endangered species list after populations that were once extirpated have been fidelity national title insurance company.
Musiani has worked on the problem of wolves killing livestock in Canada, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, and the U.S, and has served as a United Nations consultant on the issue.
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by University of Calgary.
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How A Close Bond Activates The Immune System
Science Daily &39;green&39;red' are separated and organized to form 9 distinct T cell receptor clusters. (Photo Credit: Michael Dustin)
The communication between these immune cells hasn’t been well understood because scientists had no suitable techniques to manipulate it. Now that problem has been solved. In a new study scientists at New York University School of Medicine and the University of California, Berkeley, report that they have observed the exchange of information between immune cells that is required to spark a body wide response to infection.
“This is the first time that anyone has been able to physically manipulate the immunological synapse and measure the effect on T cell signaling,” says Michael L. Dustin, Ph.D., the Irene Diamond Associate Professor of Immunology and Associate Professor of Pathology at NYU School of Medicine, and one of the lead authors of the study.
The research by Dr. Dustin and Jay T. Groves of University of California, Berkeley, and their colleagues is a fusion of biology and nanotechnology—devices at the molecular scale. The study sheds new light on the workings of T cells, the body’s most specific and potent line of defense against viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens, says Dr. Dustin who is also an professional social worker liability insurance in the molecular pathogenesis program at NYU’s Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine.
The study, published in the November 18, 2005, issue of Science, reveals how T cells analyze and react to the signals of infection at the immunological synapse.
Every T cell wears a unique molecule, called a T cell antigen receptor, on its surface that it uses to detect pieces of foreign proteins called antigens. These receptors exist in astonishing, and for all practical purposes, unlimited variety—allowing the body to recognize any pathogen it might encounter.
Just as police need evidence of a crime to begin an investigation, T cells must recognize a specific antigen before they start to fight an infection. Dendritic cells constantly scour the body for antigens and present these to T cells for review in the lymph nodes. It is a demanding job. “Just 10 dendritic cells can show viral antigens to over a million T cells in a day,” says Dr. Dustin.
Once a T cell’s antigen receptor finds an antigen match, the T cell forms an immunological synapse with a dendritic cell through which it queries the dendritic cell for additional information about the antigen and its source in the body. Is the antigen a danger or simply a harmless food protein? The interrogation may last hours, and if the antigen is deemed a threat the T cell starts multiplying, eventually producing thousands of copies of itself. These T cell clones are capable of killing invaders outright and marshaling other cells to destroy them.
In the new study, Gabriele Campi, a graduate student in Dr. Dustin’s laboratory, and Kaspar Mossman, a graduate student of Dr. Groves’s, created a synthetic dendritic cell using purified antigen and adhesion molecules (molecules that the cell can grip) in a thin fluid coating on a glass surface. In prior studies the antigen was free to move over the entire glass surface, but in this study they set up miniscule chrome barriers, allowing them to modify the pattern of T-cell antigen receptor clusters in the immunological synapse.
Previous research has shown that T cell receptors cluster in a bull’s eye-pattern at the interface between the T cell and the synthetic dendritic cell but the significance of this arrangement has been unknown. Thanks to the chrome barriers, Dr. Dustin and his colleagues discovered that the T cell receptor signal is strongest when they are physically held in the outer ring of the bull’s eye rather than the center.
“We locked the receptors in the periphery and saw enhanced signaling over a prolonged period of time. It was quite a surprise,” says Dr. Dustin. National insurance contribution had speculated that the canadian social insurance card bull’s eye structure somehow allowed T cells to maintain their state of activation. But the new work shows that it is actually the outer edge of immunological synapse that boosts activation, not the center.
Dr. Dustin’s group is now conducting additional experiments to see if dendritic cells actively present proteins to T cells in patterns that stimulate the periphery of the bull’s eye in the immunological synapse, using molecular organization to provide information about the precise nature of the threat associated with the antigen.
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by New York University Medical Center.
of 1.4 percent reported by NIDA’s 2002 Monitoring the Future Survey.
is a common form of methamphetamine, a highly addictive stimulant that affects the central nervous system. As with the powdered form, users of crystal methamphetamine are drawn to its euphoric and stimulant effects, but the drug has higher purity and more potential for abuse. Typically smoked, it produces an immediate, intense sensation and has longer acting physiological effects than powder, which also amplifies its addiction potential and adverse health consequences. Those can include: mood disturbances, cardiovascular problems, heat stroke, convulsions, and psychotic symptoms that can sometimes last for months or years after methamphetamine abuse has ceased.
