Journals at Carleton University
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Substance Use and Long-Haul Truckers
No full textIn safety-sensitive industries where the risk of harm to individuals and to others is high, substance use is a serious issue. In Canada, long-haul truck drivers hold safety-sensitive positions and require tailored supports to manage substance use in the workplace. Addressing this issue involve several laws: the Highway Traffic Act, the Canadian Criminal Code, and Canadian Human Rights Act. Thus, supporting truck drivers is complex requiring balancing laws and work duties. This study builds on previous research by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction to gain insights into work-related risks and protective factors for substance use in transportation. While research has focused on sleep and drug/alcohol testing, very few studies have examined workplace substance use policies. This study aims to identify specific risk factors, examine current policies, explore available supports, and understand stigma surrounding substance use for commercial drivers. Findings offer valuable information to improve supports and reduce substance use for drivers
Empathic and Respectful Rapport-Building Communication in Investigative Police Interviews with Suspects
No full textThe research presented in the source article highlights the value of collaboration between linguists/communication experts and police practitioners when it comes to police interviews, especially around how to establish trust during suspect interviews.
Using empathy, respect, and a genuine connection with suspects during interviews can help build rapport and lead to valuable information.
Understanding how forms of communication impact rapport-building in police interviews can be used to develop training material for interviewers
Behind the Badge: Addressing Organizational and Operational Stress in Policing Mental Health
No full textPolice officers in the UK and Ireland experience comparable mental health challenges, largely due to workplace culture and repeated exposure to trauma.
Poor management, bullying, and lack of organzational support contribute as much to mental health challenges—if not more—than traumatic incidents themselves.
Police forces must prioritize structural and cultural changes, not just individual interventions, to better support the mental health of their members
Wait for Backup or Not? How Police Officers View Their Role When Responding to an Active Shooter Event
No full textPolice officers overwhelmingly support immediate entry into active shooter scenes when a clear driving force (i.e., gunfire or wounded victims) is present.
Officer decisions align with modern active shooter training that emphasizes the Priority of Life Scale, with civilian life as the main priority, then officers, and lastly, the suspect.
The presence of a driving force dramatically increases the perceived appropriateness of immediate entry, up to 80 times more likely.
Officers are more cautious about immediate entry when no clear threat is present, opting to wait for backup or assess further.
Results counter earlier research suggesting officers hesitate to act and instead show that officers\u27 beliefs match public expectations for rapid intervention
Do Women Police Officers Use Less Force? Findings from a National Study
No full textResearchers analyzed survey data from 7,365 police-citizen encounters in six police agencies in the United States to evaluate the effects of officer’s gender on the level of force.
Results show that female officers used less force than male officers, and that women partnered with other women used less physical force than men partnered with other men. The findings remained consistent after accounting for the level of noncompliance demonstrated by the citizen and other characteristics of the encounter.
Findings also suggested that less aggressive actions by officers to noncompliant citizens were not related to increased risk for injury. However, antagonistic responses were
Balancing Duty and Family: The Effects of Support Systems on Women in Law Enforcement
No full textTwo hundred and one current and former women Dallas police officers provided survey responses to questions related to childcare, social support services, and organizational commitment.
Analyses indicated that both parental and social support significantly and positively impact officers’ levels of organizational commitment.
Analyses also highlighted challenges related to promotion and scheduling, breastfeeding, and differential expectations between mothers and fathers
Extending orthogonal planar graph drawings is fixed-parameter tractable
No full textThe task of finding an extension to a given partial drawing of a graph while adhering to constraints on the representation has been extensively studied in the literature, with well-known results providing efficient algorithms for fundamental representations such as planar and beyond-planar topological drawings. In this paper, we consider the extension problem for bend-minimal orthogonal drawings of planar graphs, which is among the most fundamental geometric graph drawing representations. While the problem was known to be NP-hard, it is natural to consider the case where only a small part of the graph is still to be drawn. Here, we establish the fixed-parameter tractability of the problem when parameterized by the size of the missing subgraph.Our algorithm is based on multiple novel ingredients which intertwine geometric and combinatorial arguments. These include the identification of a new graph representation of bend-equivalent regions for vertex placement in the plane, establishing a bound on the treewidth of this auxiliary graph, and a global point-grid that allows us to discretize the possible placement of bends and vertices into locally bounded subgrids for each of the above regions
Shortest paths in portalgons
No full textAny surface that is intrinsically polyhedral can be represented by a collection of simple polygons (fragments), glued along pairs of equally long oriented edges, where each fragment is endowed with the geodesic metric arising from its Euclidean metric. We refer to such a representation as a portalgon, and we call two portalgons equivalent if the surfaces they represent are isometric.
We analyze the complexity of shortest paths. We call a fragment happy if any shortest path on the portalgon visits it at most a constant number of times. A portalgon is happy if all of its fragments are happy. We present an efficient algorithm to compute shortest paths on happy portalgons.
The number of times that a shortest path visits a fragment is unbounded in general. We contrast this by showing that the intrinsic Delaunay triangulation of any polyhedral surface corresponds to a happy portalgon. Since computing the intrinsic Delaunay triangulation may be inefficient, we provide an efficient algorithm to compute happy portalgons for a restricted class of portalgons
CE-UV/LIF Analysis of Organic Fluorescent Dyes for Detection of Nanoplastics in Water for Quality Control
No full textNanoplastics are a type of plastic that forms because of the degradation of bulk plastics due to several natural factors, and they are everywhere around us. Nanoplastics are a global concern due to their diverse composition. Additionally, detecting and analyzing these particles in water samples is challenging, as they also often bind with organic pollutants. Current water treatment methods are ineffective against nanoplastics, and these plastics can take years to degrade completely. One of the promising methods to detect nanoplastics is using organic fluorescent dyes that can bind to the nanoplastics by interactions with their surfaces. Capillary electrophoresis with UV detection or laser-induced fluorescence are feasible techniques for this, especially laser-induced fluorescence, as it can give much more sensitivity and selectivity for the fluorescent dyes.
The research aimed to validate capillary electrophoresis (CE) with UV spectrophotometer/laser-induced fluorescence detection (LIF) for the quantitative analysis of micro/nanoplastics in lake/ground/well/tap water samples using organic fluorescent dyes. CE was used with a blue laser, a photodetector, and a UV detector. A 50%/50% mixture of R6G & DCM (Rhody dye) was used as it showed the most promising results. It was found that the CE-UV/LIF method, especially CE-LIF, has shown potential for analyzing the nanoplastics contents of real-world water samples. Rhody dye mixtures showed good binding to the polystyrene nanoplastics, especially at lower concentrations. However, with the rise of cheminformatics and artificial intelligence-machine learning, fluorescent dye-based chemosensors will be better designed for future applications of CE-UV/LIF