Fatal impact? The effects of emotional arousal and weapon presence on police officers' memories for a simulated crime

Purpose. (1) To investigate the effects of emotional arousal and weapon presence on the completeness and accuracy of police officers' memories; and (2) to better simulate the experience of witnessing a shooting and providing testimony. Methods. A firearms training simulator was used to present 70 experienced police officers with either a shooting or a domestic dispute scenario containing no weapons. Arousal was measured using both self-report and physiological indices. Recall for event details was tested after a 10-minute delay using a structured interview. Identification accuracy was assessed with a photographic line-up. Results. Self-report measures confirmed that the shooting induced greater arousal than did the other scenario. Overall, officers' memories for the event were less complete, but more accurate, when they had witnessed the shooting. The recall and line-up data did not support a weapon focus effect. Conclusions. Police officers' recall performance can be affected both qualitatively and quantitatively by witnessing an arousing event such as a shooting.

Coupled fire/evacuation analysis of the Station Nightclub fire

In this paper, coupled fire and evacuation simulation tools are used to simulate the Station Nightclub fire. This study differs from the analysis conducted by NIST in three key areas; (1)an enhanced flame spread model and (2)a toxicity generation model are used, (3)the evacuation is coupled to the fire simulation. Predicted early burning locations in the full-scale fire simulation are in line with photographic evidence and the predicted onset of flashover is similar to that produced by NIST. However, it is suggested that both predictions of the flashover time are approximately 15 sec earlier than actually occurred. Three evacuation scenarios are then considered, two of which are coupled with the fire simulation. The coupled fire and evacuation simulation suggests that 180 fatalities result from a building population of 460. With a 15 sec delay in the fire timeline, the evacuation simulation produces 84 fatalities which are in good agreement with actual number of fatalities. An important observation resulting from this work is that traditional fire engineering ASET/RSET calculations which do not couple the fire and evacuation simulations have the potential to be considerably over optimistic in terms of the level of safety achieved by building designs.

Property development: Appraisal and finance

The book provides an overview to the context of property development so that academics, students and professionals can examine the stages of development in the process - from initial consideration, to site finding, general appraisal, valuation, funding, construction and marketing, with a focus on two key areas of the process: appraisal and finance. The Second Edition reflects the developing research interests of the authors by putting property development and appraisal in a wider economic environment and the appraisal process was treated in a more holistic manner. Secondly, more case studies were included and the chapters framed with clear objectives key terms and summaries. Thirdly, this edition examined in more detail the property development and appraisal process in relation to sustainability and other key issues such as climate change, the changing financial environment, planning design and global influences. Research on appraisal techniques is incorporated in chapters 3-5. Research on property finance based on the original Property Lending Surveys carried out by the author and incorporated in other texts (Property Finance, 1994, 2003) is included in chapters 6-8. Research on property companies and their capital structures in included in chapter 8. Analysis of the relationship between sustainability and design is included in chapter 9. This is a key text in the area of property development, sales of the First Edition and Second Edition have been in the thousands globally to academics, students and practitioners.