Most Popular Books by Jonathan Allen

Children's literature continues to receive growing scholarly attention, and this is due, in part, to the increased awareness of the complexity of these works and their importance in the curriculum. While some books may become classics and continue to be read long after their publication, others are the product of contemporary society and reflect the changing values of modern American culture. So, too, those titles that have been singled out for recognition reveal the standards of awards committees. This reference is a guide to works of American children's fiction that have won awards between 1995 and 1999. Some of the books were published before that period, and thus their recent recognition affirms their enduring value. Included are more than 750 alphabetically arranged entries for authors, titles, characters, and settings related to nearly 250 books. Entries for novels provide plot summaries and critical commentary, while those for authors give biographical information. The volume demonstrates the growing number of multicultural novels and books about nontraditional families, while it also shows the continuing importance of historical fiction and the waning appeal of traditional adventure novels. While the volume will be valuable to librarians and teachers and to scholars of children's literature, it will also be useful to anyone interested in these works as a commentary on American culture at the close of the twentieth century.

A boy describes all the special things about his tabby cat.

Determined to have the three little pigs for his dinner, the wolf tries all sorts of disguises to get into their house. Suggested level: preschool, junior.

Crime linkage analysis tries to determine which crimes were committed by the same offender. This is an important police investigative function, as research has shown that a significant proportion of most crime types are committed by a small number of prolific offenders. Case clearance is related to the amount of information available to investigators, and a series of linked crimes provides more information than individual cases examined alone. However, there are only a few available methods for crime linkage. These methods commonly utilize information provided by physical evidence, offender description, and crime scene behavior (i.e., proximity in time and space, modus operandi, and signature). Recognizing that very few factors definitively link crimes, researchers have demonstrated the utility of probabilistically linking crimes using less than definitive information. Bayesian methods provide a promising method of analyzing these links. While some research has demonstrated the efficacy of these methods, the initial work validating the models has relied on limited samples. As such, the generalizability of this research is unknown. This study assesses the validity of a Bayesian crime linkage method using computational methods.