Criminologists tend to focus their attention on the dynamics of offending, paying only limited theoretical and empirical attention to the well-established relation between offending and victimization. However, a number of criminological theories either explicitly or implicitly predict similarities in the correlates and etiology of victimization and offending, suggesting substantial overlap across offender and victim populations. Empirical research over the last few decades confirms this overlap across offender and victim populations, at least among those involved in non-lethal incidents. This research explores whether similarities between offender and victim populations extends to homicide, using criminal justice, health care, and U.S. Census data, linked to homicide offenders and victims in Bernalillo County, New Mexico between 1996 and 2001. Our findings indicate substantial overlap in the social contexts and risk behaviors of homicide offenders and victims. However, our results also side with more recent suggestions that while many victims overlap with offender populations, there is also a group of victims that appears to be distinguishable from offender groups. These findings have important implications for both theory and intervention.

The criminological literature presents substantial evidence that victims and offenders in violent crimes share demographic characteristics, engage in similar lifestyles and activities, and reside in socially disorganized neighborhoods. However, research has examined these relationships separately using either victimization or offending data, and prior studies have not examined these relationships by comparing victims and offenders within the same incidents. This has limited efforts to examine whether these factors are associated with victimization and offending in similar or distinct ways. Using a law enforcement database of victims (N = 1,248) and offenders (N = 1,735) involved within the same aggravated battery incidents (N = 1,015) in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, this research explores whether victims and offenders involved in nonlethal violence share certain individual, neighborhood, and situational characteristics. Results suggest that victims and offenders live in socially disorganized neighborhoods and engage in risky lifestyles and violent offending behaviors in similar proportions. These findings highlight the overlapping factors associated with victimization and offending in non-lethal violent personal crimes. The implications of these findings are discussed.1

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a b s t r a c tMassive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are becoming an essential source of information for both students and teachers. Noticeably, MOOCs have to adapt to the fast development of new technologies; they also have to satisfy the current generation of online students. The current MOOCs' Management Systems, such as Coursera, Udacity, edX, etc., use content management platforms where content are organized in a hierarchical structure. We envision a new generation of MOOCs that support interpretability with formal semantics by using the SemanticWeb and the online social networks. Semantic technologies support more flexible information management than that offered by the current MOOCs' platforms. Annotated information about courses, video lectures, assignments, students, teachers, etc., can be composed from heterogeneous sources, including contributions from the communities in the forum space. These annotations, combined with legacy data, build foundations for more efficient information discovery in MOOCs' platforms. In this article we review various Collaborative Semantic Filtering technologies for building Semantic MOOCs' management system, then, we present a prototype of a semantic middle-sized platform implemented at Western Kentucky University that answers these aforementioned requirements.