ABO and Lewis typing of secretion stains on nitrocellulose membranes using a new dot-blot-ELISA technique

A new method for ABO and Lewis typing of body fluids is described. It combines the advantages of a good antigen binding to nitrocellulose membranes, the need of only very small amounts of stain material and the high sensitivity of an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for antigen detection. This is of special interest because conventional ABO and Lewis typing of secretion stains need relatively large stain dimensions. The method is very easy to handle, does not need any expensive equipment and gives a permanent record. Furthermore the high sensitivity offers the possibility of analyzing even sweat and urine stains without the need of concentrating these extracts.     

Government Risk-Financing Pools: An Assessment of Current Practices

Since 1970, state and local governments have experienced two “insurance crises;” the first occurred in the mid- to late-1970s and the second in the mid-80s. The result has been a twenty-year period of time in which state and local governments have been able to afford insurance only intermittently-if insurance has been available at all. In response to this problem, local governments, government associations, and state governments created alternative risk-finartcing mechanisms to provide coverage for themselves. These mechanisms, commonly referred to as self-insurance pools, enable local governments within a state to pool together risks and resources to finance the costs of fortuitous losses. In 1988, the first comprehensive examination of pooling practices was undertaken through a nationwide survey. This article reports the findings from the first follow-up study since the 1988 survey and further extends knowledge of pooling and pooling practices.     

Defendant-juror similarity and mock joror judgments

It was hypothesized that joror-defendant similarity would lead to greater leniency toward a criminal defendant when the evidence against that defendant was weak or inconclusive; but when evidence was strong, it was expected that this relationship would be reversed. In Study 1, religious similarity was found to be simply and positively related to evaluation of the defendant and leniency, a relationship unaffected by the strength of evidence. This pattern of results was attributed to (a) insufficiently strong evidence against the defendant and (b) the lack of anticipated jury deliberation, problems addressed in Study 2. In that study, when evidence was strong against the defendant, juror-defendant racial similarity did increase the likelihood of conviction, but only when jurors anticipated being in the racial minority in their jury. Implications of the findings for psychological theory and for voir dire were discussed.The authors wish to thank Howard Klein and Jane Stanfel for their assistance in data collection and analysis in Experiment 2, and the Editor and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions on an earlier draft.