Service-Seeking Behavior,Perceptions of Armed Actors,and Preferences Regarding Governance: Evidence from the Palestinian Territories

Armed non-state actors, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, are visibly engaged in providing social welfare in addition to participating in violence. A number of scholars have suggested that there is a relationship between service provision by terrorist organizations and support from service recipients, and have indicated that terrorist organizations use service provision strategically for this purpose. However, few studies have examined the experiences and opinions of service recipients themselves to understand if services do indeed influence populations' political loyalties and opinions regarding violent activities. Using data from more than 1,000 low to moderate income individuals in Palestine, this study seeks to understand if and how receiving services from a specific organization engenders loyalty to the organization, passive acceptance and/or favorable approval of the organizations' violent activities, and the likelihood of participation in the organization's violent activities. This paper explores if and how provision of aid and “governance” services by armed non-state actors is correlated with various aspects of individuals' experiences of conflict, such as their opinions about the use of violence and various strategies for attaining peace, their fellow community members' likelihood to join armed groups and engage in fighting, and their preferences regarding state structure and legal system.     

Reforming the U.S. Department of Transportation: Challenges and Opportunities of the Government Performance and Results Act for Federal-State Relations

This article examines attempts during 1993–1999 to reformthe U.S. Department of Transportation to hold it accountablefor achieving improved program results through performance measures.These attempts affected the department's relationships withCongress and the states. The political context, institutionalstructure, federal system, and separation of powers into whichthese reforms were introduced limited the course and outcomesof the reforms. For the reforms to succeed, changes need totake place in the behavior of state transportation departmentsand members of Congress. However, there are no clear incentivesfor either constituency to change its behavior. Instead, thestates' political interests in maintaining their flexibilitiesand the electoral concerns of members of Congress create incentivesthat undermine rather than enforce reform.     

Massive acute arsenic poisonings

Arsenic poisonings are still important in the field of toxicology, though they are not as frequent as about 20-30 years ago. In this paper, the arsenic concentrations in ante- and post-mortem materials, and also forensic and anatomo-pathological aspects in three cases of massive acute poisoning with arsenic(III) oxide (two of them with unexplained criminalistic background, in which arsenic was taken for amphetamine and one suicide), are presented. Ante-mortem blood and urine arsenic concentrations ranged from 2.3 to 6.7 microg/ml, respectively. Post-mortem tissue total arsenic concentrations were also detected in large concentrations. In case 3, the contents of the duodenum contained as much as 30.1% arsenic(III) oxide. The high concentrations of arsenic detected in blood and tissues in all presented cases are particularly noteworthy in that they are very rarely detected at these concentrations in fatal arsenic poisonings.     

Spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage related to methamphetamine abuse: autopsy findings and clinical correlation

A healthy 31-year-old male abstinent from drug abuse during his recent incarceration developed slurred speech, a severe headache, and left-sided hemiparesis prior to his eventual death 9.5 hours after inhalation of methamphetamine. On postmortem examination, inspection of the brain revealed bilateral subarachnoid hemorrhage, with a prominent intralobar hemorrhage centered within the right frontal cerebral hemisphere. No evidence of vasculitis, infarction, intraventricular hemorrhage, or ruptured aneurysm could be observed. While this is not the first report of a methamphetamine-related stroke, this report describes the autopsy findings of an intracerebral hemorrhage secondary to methamphetamine abuse on autopsy and compares the findings and antemortem history to previously reported methamphetamine cerebral vascular deaths.     

Assessing Stability and Change in Criminal Offending: A Comparison of Random Effects, Semiparametric, and Fixed Effects Modeling Strategies

An important theoretical problem for criminologists is an explanation forthe robust positive correlation between prior and future criminaloffending. Nagin and Paternoster (1991) have suggested that the correlationcould be due to time-stable population differences in the underlyingproneness to commit crimes (population heterogeneity) and/or thecriminogenic effect that crime has on social bonds, conventionalattachments, and the like (state dependence). Because of data andmeasurement limitations, the disentangling of population heterogeneityand state dependence requires that researchers control for unmeasuredpersistent heterogeneity. Frequently, random effects probit models havebeen employed, which, while user-friendly, make a strong parametricassumption that the unobserved heterogeneity in the population follows anormal distribution. Although semiparametric alternatives to the randomeffects probit model have recently appeared in the literature to avoid thisproblem, in this paper we return to reconsider the fully parametric model. Viasimulation evidence, we first show that the random effects probit modelproduces biased estimates as the departure of heterogeneity from normalitybecomes more substantial. Using the 1958 Philadelphia cohort data, we thencompare the results from a random effects probit model with a semiparametricprobit model and a fixed effects logit model that makes no assumptions aboutthe distribution of unobserved heterogeneity. We found that with this dataset all three models converged on the same substantive result—evenafter controlling for unobserved persistent heterogeneity, with models thattreat the unobserved heterogeneity very differently, prior conduct had apronounced effect on subsequent offending. These results are inconsistentwith a model that attributes all of the positive correlation between priorand future offending to differences in criminal propensity. Sinceresearchers will often be completely blind with respect to the tenabilityof the normality assumption, we conclude that different estimationstrategies should be brought to bear on the data.     

Socialization and generational political trajectories: an age,period and cohort analysis of political participation in Britain

The role of political socialization in explaining disengagement from specific modes of activism beyond voting remains largely unexplored, limited to date by available data and methods. While most previous studies have tended to propose explanations for disengagement linked to specific repertoires of political action, we propose a unified theory based on the different socialization experiences of subsequent generations. We test this theory using a new dataset of collated waves of the British Social Attitudes Survey and by applying age–period–cohort models for repeated cross-sectional data and generalized additive models to identify generational effects. We show that generational effects underlie the participatory decline across repertoires. Consistent with our expectations, the results reveal that the generation of “Thatcher’s Children” are much less likely to engage in a range of repertoires of political action than “Wilson/Callaghan’s Children”, who came of age in the more politicized 1960s and 1970s. Significantly, and in line with our theoretical expectations, the “Blair’s Babies” generation is the least politically engaged of all. We reflect on these findings and highlight the concerning implications of falling levels of activism for advanced democracies.     

Five women painters: The making of a television series

Broken Dreams? Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas

Race‐ing Justice, En‐gender‐ing Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. and introd. by Toni Morrison, Chatto and Windus, 1993, £12.99.

Unfixing the Maternal: the Case against Object‐Relations Theory

Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the ‘Good Enough Mother’, University of Michigan Press, 1992.

Troubled British Hearts

Rose Tremain, Sacred Country, Sinclair‐Stevenson, 1992, £14.99

Crossing Boundaries

Maureen Duffy, Illuminations, Sinclair‐Stevenson, 1991, £13.95, Fontana paperback, 1992, £5.99.

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body, Jonathan Cape, 1992, £13.99.

Fairy Tales of our Time. Steven Spielberg (director), Jurassic Park     

“Sex change” in skeletal remains: Assessing how heat-induced changes interfere with sex estimation

The true impact of heat-induced changes in human bone regarding their sex estimation has not been comprehensively documented having a potentially negative impact on forensic anthropology. The objective of this paper was to evaluate how heat exposure affects sex estimation based on both morphological and metric features. The study focused in both low-to-medium intensity burns and high intensity burns. Selected sexually dimorphic features were analysed in 51 experimentally burnt skeletons from the 21st Century Identified Skeletal Collection. Bones were burnt to maximum temperatures between 450 °C and 1050 °C achieved after 75 to 257 min. Morphological methods tested in this study comprised the recommendations for hipbone features from Buikstra and Ubelaker (1994) and from Bruzek (2002). On the other hand, metric references tested here were the ones from Wasterlain (2000), Curate et al. (2016) and Gonçalves et al. (2013) focused on the humerus, femur, calcaneus and talus. Agreement was tested with Gwet’s AC1 test and was further assessed by calculating the relative amount of perfect agreements. Results demonstrated that heat-induced changes affected not only the scoring of morphological features burnt at high temperatures but also the scoring of features burnt at lower intensities. On the other hand, metric features were only considerably affected in high intensity burns, no major changes being documented for low-to-medium intensity burns. For low-to-medium intensity burns, the Bruzek and Curate et al. methods revealed a better agreement between the pre- and post-burning scores. For high intensity burns, better agreement was obtained by using the Bruzek (2002) and Gonçalves et al. (2013) methods. As expected, heat-induced warping, fracture and metric change had a major impact on the pre- and post-observations’ agreement. Contrary to what has been systematically assumed over the years, this impact is also quite substantial in bones burnt at low-to-medium burn intensities so caution is advised during the analysis of this kind of burnt skeletal material.