Asia‐Pacific economic cooperation: Progress and prospects

Secretary of Foreign Affairs Domingo L. Siazon Jr. of the Philippines discusses the Asia‐Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum's path to the present, and charts a map for its future. Siazon sees the importance of promoting greater private‐sector involvement in APEC and enhancing economic cooperation among member economies. Siazon discusses the special significance of this year's meetings to be held at Subic Bay in the Philippines, the former home of the US Pacific Fleet and now a growing industrial and tourism center. Pursuing APEC's free‐trade goals, he says, holds the brightest economic future for the Philippines and the region.     

AFTER LABELING AND CONFLICT

Criminology will become somewhat more concerned for values in the future hence shifting slightly from the empirical, scientific end of the spectrum toward the normative, philosophical end. This will result from crises in criminal justice. from the “coming crisis in western sociology.” from the effects of “critical criminology” from changes in social science generally. and from broader circumstances of criminology and criminal justice.     

Systematic differences in electropherogram peak heights reported by different versions of the GeneScan software

DNA profiling using STRs on the 310 and 3100 Genetic Analyzers routinely generates electropherograms that are analyzed with the GeneScan software available from the instrument's manufacturer, Applied Biosystems. Users have been able to choose from three different smoothing options that have been known to result in significant differences in the peak heights that are reported. Improvements in the underlying algorithm of the most recent version of the software also result in significant and somewhat predictable differences in peak height values. Laboratories that have performed validation studies using older versions of GeneScan should either reanalyze the data generated in those validation studies with the newest version of the software or otherwise take into consideration the systematically higher peak height values obtained as they begin following the recommendation of the manufacturer and use the new algorithm.