Metric forensic anthropology decisions: Reliability and biasability of sectioning-point-based sex estimates

Subjective decisions make human cognitive processes more susceptible to bias and error. Specifically, research indicates that additional context biases forensic anthropologists’ morphological analyses. To address whether metric analyses are also subject to bias, we conducted a pilot study in which 52 experienced osteologists measured a difficult-to-classify human femur, with or without additional contextual information. Using a metric sectioning-point sex-estimation method, participants provided a sex estimate for individual skeletal element(s) and, when given multiple elements, the combined skeletal assemblage. Control group participants (n = 24) measured only the femur. In addition to the femur, bias group participants (n = 28) either measured a female humerus and viewed a female-biasing photograph (n = 14) or measured a male humerus and viewed a male-biasing photograph (n = 14). We explored whether the experts in the different groups would differ in: (1) femoral measurements; (2) femoral sex-estimation conclusions; and (3) final sex-estimation conclusions for the skeletal assemblage. Although the femoral measurements and femoral sex estimates were comparable across groups, the overall sex estimates in the female-biased group were impacted by contextual information—differing from both the control and male-biased groups (p < 0.001). Our results demonstrate that cognitive bias can occur even in metric sex-estimation conclusions. Specifically, this occurred when the metric data and single-element sex estimates were synthesized into an overall estimate. Thus, our results suggest that metric methods are most vulnerable to bias when data are synthesized into an overall conclusion, highlighting the need for bias countermeasures and comprehensive statistical frameworks for synthesizing metric data to mitigate the effects of cognitive bias.     

Leading and recognizing public value

This article examines the relationship between leadership and public value, which is particularly challenging in a context of explicit contest and conflict. The theoretical framework is illustrated through a case study of policing rural crime. The study reveals that the police worked with multiple and competing publics rather than a single homogeneous public, and that part of their leadership role was to create and convene a public space in which different voices and divergent views could be expressed. The study notes that research needs to pay attention to the loss and displacement of public value, not solely its creation and recognition. The need to convene multiple publics required the police to lead, as part of a leadership constellation, and with political astuteness. The findings have wider relevance for other public services, and for studies of leadership and public value at the intersection between the state and civil society.     

Self-settled Refugees in Uganda: An Alternative Approach to Displacement?

This paper investigates the complex security and economic dynamicsthat influence the lives and opportunities of self-settled refugeesliving in Uganda. It focuses on the opportunities and problemsfaced by self-settled refugees, and questions the assumptionthat Uganda's current local settlement policy is best suitedto the country's social, economic and political realities. Itsuggests that far from being passive victims, self-settled refugeesare taking control of their lives without any additional externalassistance and are planning for the day they can return to theirhomeland. Consequently, the paper argues that there is reasonto believe that local integration is likely to succeed whereother models have failed.     

The use of phosphate buffered saline for the recovery of cells and spermatozoa from swabs.

In the forensic science laboratory, the recovery of spermatozoa from vaginal swabs, or vaginal cells from penile swabs, can help determine if sexual intercourse may have taken place. There are several methods used to recover spermatozoa and cells from the swabs before visualisation on a microscope slide and most of these methods use water. Phosphate buffered saline (PBS) is a non-toxic solution used in many biological laboratories. Unlike water, PBS prevents cells rupturing or shrivelling up due to osmosis. This study demonstrates that PBS can be used for the extraction of spermatozoa and cells from swabs and that PBS does not affect subsequent DNA profiling.     

International democracy promotion and democratization in the Middle East and North Africa

This article offers an overview of the literature on international democracy promotion in relation to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It draws on the criteria of process tracing to evaluate the mechanisms, processes and episodes of democratization associated with international democracy promotion in the region. It finds that the literature lacks a clear account of how international democracy promotion relates to conditions for democratization and could pay greater attention to the role of media in either supporting or counteracting democracy promotion activities which impact democratization processes in the region.     

‘Philosophical vacuity and political ineptitude’: the freewoman's critique of the suffrage movement 1

The Freewoman has commonly been read as an example of New Woman periodical publishing, through its focus on women's sexuality and autonomy from men. The journal appears to offer a more daring, twentieth-century and modern ‘new woman’, more willing than even her 1890s counterpart to embrace free unions or sexual experimentation. The Freewoman's extraordinary discussions of sexuality have tended to distract historians' attention from other elements of the debates it engendered. In particular, the political argument found within its pages has received insufficient attention; the journal tends to be misread as a socialist publication. Placing the journal as part of the New Woman narrative lends itself to an alternative view of the political subject of The Freewoman; the New Woman focus on individuality, autonomy and creative genius plays an important part in the distinctive political debates found within the journal. Although the suffrage struggle dominated Edwardian feminist activism, many Freewoman contributors rejected the vote entirely. In aperiod when new liberal or Fabian conceptions of an increasingly interventionist state appeared to sit comfortably with feminist demands for a more inclusive and socially responsible state, The Freewoman took an anti-statist stance. Rejecting the common suffragist metaphor of the state as the home writ large, Freewoman contributors saw the state as machine-like. The author explores the motivations for these positions, and the development of an individualist-feminist, or even egoist stance. Specifically, she outlines contributors' rejection of militant suffrage activism, and their contestation of the citizen as a rights-holding and consenting political subject, and maps the alternative political structures suggested within The Freewoman, and the manner in which concepts of individuality found within New Woman discourse served to construct a disturbingly elitist and even coercive feminist politics.