Publications by authors named "Joshua J Vertalka"

Background: Animal cruelty appears to be widespread. Competing theories have been posed regarding the causes of animal cruelty leading to conflicting findings and little direction for public policies to combat it.

Objective: To assess the applicability of extant theories of the causes of animal cruelty: domestic violence; deviance; perpetrator traits; and social disorganization.

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This research contributes to extant knowledge about dog bites by using police department bite incident data to explore three sets of potential correlates of bites: traits of the victim, traits of the dog including the circumstances surrounding the bite, and traits of the neighborhood in which the bite occurred. It employs data on 478 bites, over a period of 8 years, in an urban setting that includes significant numbers of roaming dogs (both feral and owned), and incorporates a number of variables not included in past research. While environmental variables such as structural abandonment contribute to dog bite risk human error is most commonly at fault.

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Background: Dog bites can have an array of negative health impacts on victims. Research focusing on the correlates of bites focused on limited sets of variables and produced conflicting findings.

Objective: To expand knowledge about the correlates of dog bites by exploring a comprehensive set of variables related to the nature of the dog and the circumstances surrounding the bite not commonly explored in extant research.

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Two code files and one dataset related to Olympic Twitter activity are the foundation for this article. Through Twitter's Spritzer streaming API (Application Programming Interface), we collected over 430 million tweets from May 12th, 2016 to September 12th, 2016 windowing the Rio de Janeiro Olympics and Paralympics. We cleaned and filtered these tweets to contain Olympic-related content.

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Objective: To identify demographic and urban environmental variables associated with prevalence rates of dog bites per zip code in Detroit.

Design: Retrospective ecological study.

Sample: 6,540 people who visited any 1 of 15 hospital emergency rooms in the 29 zip codes in Detroit between January 1, 2006, and December 31, 2013, with a primary complaint of dog bite.

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