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Given that the ability to attend to a task without distraction underlies performance in a wide variety of contexts, training one's ability to stay on task should result in a similarly broad enhancement of performance. In a randomized controlled investigation, we examined whether a 2-week mindfulness-training course would decrease mind wandering and improve cognitive performance. Mindfulness training improved both GRE reading-comprehension scores and working memory capacity while simultaneously reducing the occurrence of distracting thoughts during completion of the GRE and the measure of working memory. Improvements in performance following mindfulness training were mediated by reduced mind wandering among participants who were prone to distraction at pretesting. Our results suggest that cultivating mindfulness is an effective and efficient technique for improving cognitive function, with wide-reaching consequences.

Commissions of inquiry play an important role in the aftermath of crisis, by serving as instruments of accountability and policy learning. Yet crises also involve a high-stake game of political survival, in which accountability and learning pose a serious threat to incumbent politicians. The political decision of whether to appoint a commission of inquiry after a crisis thus provides a unique prism for studying the intense conflict between politics, accountability and policy learning. Using data from the United Kingdom, this study develops and tests a choice model for this political decision. The results show that the political decision to appoint inquiries into public crises is strongly influenced by short-term blame avoidance considerations, media salience and government popularity.

Credibility assessment is an area in which information systems research can make a major impact. This paper reports on two studies investigating a system solution for automatic, noninvasive detection of rigidity for automated interviewing. Kinesic rigidity has long been a phenomenon of interest in the credibility assessment literature, but until now was infeasible as a veracity indicator in practical use cases. An initial study unexpectedly revealed the occurrence of rigidity in a highly controlled concealed information test setting, prompting the design and implementation of an automated rigidity detection system for interviewing. A unique experimental evaluation supported the system concept. The results of the second study confirmed the kinesic rigidity found in the first, and provided further theoretical insights explaining the rigidity phenomenon. Although additional research is needed, the evidence from this investigation suggests that credibility assessment can benefit from a rigidity detection system.

This article analyzes a category of truth-telling initiatives that emerge from civil society and resemble, either self-consciously or coincidentally, official truth commissions such as those in Chile, Peru, South Africa, and Timor-Leste. Like truth commissions, these Unofficial Truth Projects (UTPs) seek to elucidate, clarify, and acknowledge past human rights abuse or mass atrocity in order to contribute to democratic rule and peace for the long-term.

Official apologies and truth commissions are increasingly utilized as mechanisms to address human rights abuses. Both are intended to transform inter-group relations by marking an end point to a history of wrongdoing and providing the means for political and social relations to move beyond that history. However, state-dominated reconciliation mechanisms are inherently problematic for indigenous communities. In this paper, we examine the use of apologies, and truth and reconciliation commissions in four countries with significant indigenous populations: Canada, Australia, Peru, and Guatemala. In each case, the reconciliation mechanism differentiated the goal of reconciliation from an indigenous self-determination agenda. The resulting state-centered strategies ultimately failed to hold states fully accountable for past wrongs and, because of this, failed to transform inter-group relations.

This article analyzes the relationship between truth and politics by asking whether the 'publicness' of a truth commission – defined by whether it has public hearings, releases a public report, and names perpetrators – contributes to democratization. The article reviews scholarship relevant to the potential democratizing effects of truth commissions and derives mechanisms that help explain this relationship. Work from the transitional justice field as well as democratization and political transition more generally is considered. Using a newly-constructed Truth Commission Publicness Dataset (TCPD), the analysis finds that even after statistically controlling for initial levels of democracy, democratic trends in the years prior to a commission, level of wealth, amnesties and/or trials, the influence of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and different cutoff points for measuring democratization across a number of models, more publicness predicts higher levels of democracy years after the commission has finished its work. The more public a truth commission is, the more it will contribute to democratization. The finding that more public truth commissions are associated with higher levels of democratization indicates particular strategies that policymakers, donors, and civil society activists may take to improve prospects for democracy in a country planning a truth commission in the wake of violence and/or government abuse.

Using a panel data set of European countries, this paper investigates the impact of crime on international tourism. Violent crimes are negatively associated with incoming international tourists and international tourism revenue indicating that international tourists consider the risk of victimization when choosing a location to visit. This impact is smaller in magnitude in Southern European countries with a coastline which are generally more attractive tourist destinations in terms of sea tourism, suggesting that victimization risk and attractiveness of the destination may be substitutable traits.

This article describes and analyses the implementation and results of undercover operations in one country (the Netherlands). First, we examine and analyse the main assumptions underlying academic and legislative discourses relating both to the regulation and control of undercover operations and to the kind of results the operations may produce. Second, we analyse documentation and interviews relating to all 89 Dutch criminal investigations in 2004 in which undercover teams were consulted.

We model a system that consists of a stream of customers processed through three steps by two resources. The first resource, an investigator, handles the first step, in which she collects information from the customer and decides what work will be done in the second step by the second resource, the back office. In the third step, the investigator returns to the customer armed with the additional information or analysis done by the back office and provides the customer with a conclusion, solution, or diagnosis. The investigator has to prioritize either seeing a new customer or completing the work with a customer already in the system. While serving one customer, the investigator may be interrupted by requests from the other customers in the system. Our main objective is to understand the impact of the investigator's choices on system throughput. In addition, we are interested in the occupancy of the system (and thus the flow time of customers). We create a stylized queueing model to examine the investigator's decisions and show that, when interruptions are not an issue, the investigator should prioritize new customers to maximize throughput, keeping the system as full as possible. If customers who have been in the system for a long time generate interruptions and thus additional work for the investigator, we show that it is asymptotically optimal for the investigator to keep the system occupancy low and prioritize discharging customers. Our conclusions are based on a model of a re-entrant queue with dedicated servers serving multiple stations, with two novel features: a buffer that is shared between stations, and jobs in the system generating additional work for the servers. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

One of the many reforms to have emerged from the Stephen Lawrence inquiry is that requiring the police to make a record of all stops (Recommendation 61). What might have been accepted as a fairly routine extension of the existing regulatory framework was widely resented by officers who considered it part of an ‘attack’ on the police service spearheaded by allegations of institutional racism. This ‘attack’, it is argued here, has been experienced as a form of collective trauma, giving rise to a series of defence mechanisms and allied forms of resistance that have distanced the new recording requirement from its intended purpose. Such defences, it is concluded, should be anticipated and addressed as part of the process of reform.