Homicide is generally considered the most serious of all crimes and according to this line of reasoning, constitutes the “tip of the iceberg” of underlying crime. As such, homicide is frequently... Show moreHomicide is generally considered the most serious of all crimes and according to this line of reasoning, constitutes the “tip of the iceberg” of underlying crime. As such, homicide is frequently used as an indicator of the level of violence in cross-national and historical studies. The same could be said for drug-related homicide, specifically. Many drug-related violent incidents remain unreported – including torture, physical assault, threats and so on. In the absence of a full picture of the level of drug-related violence, it can be necessary to use other related indicators for which data is more readily available such as drug-related homicide (DRH). From this perspective, DRH would form a lethal tip of the iceberg of underlying drug-related criminal violence, which in turn could be an indicator of underlying drug market activity. If we indeed consider drug-related homicide as a tip of the iceberg of underlying criminal violence, then we would expect such homicides to cluster together in time and space with other types of criminal violence – in particular firearm-related homicides and other, non-lethal firearm incidents.In this working paper we seek to assess to what extent DRH cluster together with firearm- related violence and whether these forms of violence could be used as indicators of underling drug crime. Show less
Spark NLP is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) library built on top of Apache Spark ML. It provides simple, performant & accurate NLP annotations for machine learning pipelines that can scale... Show moreSpark NLP is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) library built on top of Apache Spark ML. It provides simple, performant & accurate NLP annotations for machine learning pipelines that can scale easily in a distributed environment. Spark NLP comes with 1100+ pretrained pipelines and models in more than 192+ languages. It supports nearly all the NLP tasks and modules that can be used seamlessly in a cluster. Downloaded more than 2.7 million times and experiencing 9x growth since January 2020, Spark NLP is used by 54% of healthcare organizations as the world’s most widely used NLP library in the enterprise. Show less
In this thesis project, new manganese(III) compounds containing phenol-pyrazole ligands are presented. Small variations on the phenol-pyrazole ligand have been performed to investigate the role of... Show moreIn this thesis project, new manganese(III) compounds containing phenol-pyrazole ligands are presented. Small variations on the phenol-pyrazole ligand have been performed to investigate the role of the ligand in the formation of new complexes. The reaction conditions are also crucial to determine the nuclearity of the obtained compounds, which range from mononuclear to octanuclear compounds. Additionally, the magnetic properties of the synthesized compounds were studied. Magneto-structural correlations are presented to assess the important structural features for tuning the magnetic properties. Show less
Sodium alanate (NaAlH4) is a prototype system for storage of hydrogen in chemical form. However, a key experimental finding, that early transition metals (TMs) like Ti, Zr, and Sc are good... Show moreSodium alanate (NaAlH4) is a prototype system for storage of hydrogen in chemical form. However, a key experimental finding, that early transition metals (TMs) like Ti, Zr, and Sc are good catalysts for hydrogen release and re-uptake, while traditional hydrogenation catalysts like Pd and Pt are poor catalysts for NaAlH4, has so far gone unexplained. We have performed density functional theory calculations at the PW91 generalised gradient approximation level on Ti, Zr, Sc, Pd, and Pt interacting with the (001) surface of nanocrystalline NaAlH4, employing a cluster model of the complex metal hydride. A key difference between Ti, Zr, and Sc on the one hand, and Pd and Pt on the other hand is that exchange of the early TM atoms with a surface Na ion, whereby Na is pushed on to the surface, is energetically preferred over surface absorption in an interstitial site, as found for Pd and Pt. The theoretical findings are consistent with a crucial feature of the TM catalyst being that it can be transported with the reaction boundary as it moves into the bulk, enabling the starting material to react away while the catalyst eats its way into the bulk, and effecting a phase separation between a Na-rich and a Al-rich phase. In addition, the role of different active species such as Ti2 and TiH2 has been studied using the same model. The results imply that Ti2 and TiH2 are more stable in the subsurface region of the cluster than on the surface. Calculations were performed on the decomposition of two calcium alanates, to determine zero-point energy corrected enthalpies of dehydrogenation for these compounds, and to determine whether destabilization of LiBH4 by CaH2 might improve the performance of this material. Show less
