Adolescents as mothers: An interdisciplinary approach to a complex problem

Pregnancy among adolescents, and especially among low-income adolescents, represents a high-risk situation from multiple points of view. When compared to data for the population at large, obstetrical outcome is worsened, subsequent educational attainment is poor, social prognosis is guarded, and repeat unwanted pregnancies are common. The surviving infants, similarly have relatively high incidences of medical and developmental problems. In recent years, comprehensive interdisciplinary programs have been organized to offer more meaningful help to these individuals. The present report describes the authors' 5-year experience with one early intensive program. Considerable medical, educational, and social successes have been noted. The results are especially striking when contrasted with the authors' current experience with an improving but still more fragmented and less successful program. Findings concerning infant development and the mother-infant interaction are also noted. Finally, issues related to the achievement of successes and the persistence of problems after provision of more adequate comprehensive services are discussed.This study was supported in part by Grant No. 03-H-000-079-03-0, Maternal and Child Health Service, H.S.M.H.A., H.E.W.While on the faculty of the State University of New York, College of Medicine at Syracuse, was a founder and the first medical director of the YMED program.Specialty is Developmental Psychology, and research interests concern infant and early child development and the effects of children on parents. While on the faculty of Cornell University, served as a consultant to the YMED program.Project director of the high-risk program.While on the faculty of the State University of New York, College of Medicine at Syracuse, was obstetrical director of the YMED program.     

Random transfer of technology: An unexplored phenomenon

Technology transfer can take place in a wide variety of ways and at many levels. Nonetheless, the topic of technology transfer between countries has hitherto dealt mainly with planned transfers, particularly from developed countries to either developing countries or less-developed countries. This discussion first points out that technology transfer is not confined to the above dyads; it then, more importantly, broadens the horizons of such transfers by touching on and elucidating the phenomenon of random transfer of technology. In the process, it focuses on an important source of random technology transfer; namely, foreign students studying in the U.S. Rajan Nataraajan is Assistant Professor of marketing at Auburn University and Executive Editor ofPsychology & Marketing, a scholarly journal that focuses on the psychological aspects of marketing phenomena. His current research interests are consumer psychology, quantitative aspects of marketing, and international marketing.     

Do bone elasticity and postmortem interval affect forensic fractographic analyses?

Forensic fractographic features of bone reliably establish crack propagation in perimortem injuries. We investigated if similar fracture surface features characterize postmortem fractures. Experimentally induced peri- and postmortem fractures were used to assess if fractographic features vary as bone elasticity decreases during the postmortem interval (PMI). Thirty-seven unembalmed, defleshed human femoral shafts from males and females aged 33–81 years were fractured at varying PMIs with a drop test frame using a three-point bending setup and recorded with a high-speed camera. Vital statistics, cause of death, PMI length, temperature, humidity, collagen percentage, water loss, fracture energy, and fractography scores were recorded for each sample. Results showed that fractographic features associated with perimortem fractures were expressed in PMIs up to 40,600 accumulated degree hours (ADH), or 60 warm weather days. Hackle was the most consistently expressed feature, occurring in all fractures regardless of ADH. The most variable characteristics were wake features (78.4%) and arrest ridges (70.3%). Collagen percentage did not correlate strongly with ADH (r = −0.04, p = 0.81); however, there was a strong significant correlation between ADH and water loss (r = 0.74, p < 0.001). Multinomial logistic regression showed no association between fractographic feature expression and ADH or collagen percentage. In conclusion, forensic fractographic features reliably determine initiation and directionality of crack propagation in experimentally induced PMIs up to 40,600 ADH, demonstrating the utility of this method into the recent postmortem interval. This expression of reliable fractographic features throughout the early PMI intimates these characteristics may not be useful standalone features for discerning peri- versus postmortem fractures.     

Simple clearing technique as species determination tool in blowfly larvae

A simple clearing technique is presented by which species specific structures and organs of blowfly larvae can easily be visualized and displayed without any danger of mechanical damages or dislocations of delicate formations and without fixation of the object.     

Regional arrangements for providing liquidity in a financial crisis: developments in East Asia

Abstract

During the last decade three books have had a disproportionate impact on China Studies because of their controversial interpretations: Jenner's The Tyranny of History, which predicts the disintegration of the Chinese state; Menzies' 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, which describes how Chinese sailors circumnavigated the globe well before any Europeans; and Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's biography Mao: The Unknown Story. All are revisionist histories that amongst other (usually controversial) conclusions suggest there has been a conspiracy to keep the information they convey hidden. Considering their arguments and the manner of their enquiry and expression is interesting in more general ways about the construction of narrative and the nature of conspiracy, as well as about the lessons for academic research.     

Colonialism and the health transition: Aboriginal Australians and poor whites compared, Victoria, 1850–1985

This paper presents the results of the first two longitudinal historical cradle-to-grave datasets constructed in Australia: the Aboriginal population of the state of Victoria, reconstituted backwards using genealogical research and vital registrations, 1835–1930; and an impoverished European population born at the Melbourne Lying-In Hospital, 1857–1900 and traced until 1985. It investigates the hypothesis that the health transition in indigenous people was different from that of the dominant non-indigenous population. Both of these studied sub-populations were highly stressed, resulting in high infant mortality and persistent tuberculosis mortality. The Aboriginal population suffered the additional burdens of racism and social exclusion, even though after the passage of the 1886 ‘Half-Castes Act’, the majority of Aboriginal Victorians were legally ‘white’. The impact of that legislation and the systematic exclusion of Aboriginal Victorians from federal entitlements in the twentieth century sent the Aboriginal health transition into reverse. The contrasting fates of poor whites and ‘unofficial blacks’ during the health transition demonstrate the health burdens of inequality and racial discrimination, and reveal that ‘the gap’ in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is a historical product of long-term government policy and exclusion from citizenship and its entitlements.     

Female Sexual Homicide Offenders: A Descriptive and Comparative Study

Research on female sexual homicide has been very scarce. In Europe, it has rarely been examined, and in Scotland, it has never previously been studied. This exploratory study aims to examine the characteristics of sexual homicides involving female offenders between 1990 and 2015 in Scotland. Using data from the Scottish Homicide Database between 1990 and 2015, female sexual homicides (n = 7) were compared to nonsexual homicides committed by females (n = 106) and to sexual homicides committed by men (n = 89) using Fisher's exact tests. The findings show that although female sexual homicide offenders are similar to both female nonsexual homicide offenders and male sexual homicide offenders in certain aspects, there are important differences that distinguish sexual homicides involving female offenders from both groups. Female sexual homicide offenders can arguably be seen as a distinct group of offenders, with specific characteristics and specific needs.     

Reviews

John L. H. Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilisation. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977. 614 pp. £12.50.

Archie Brown and Jack Gray (eds.), Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States. London: Macmillan, 1977. xiii+286 pp. £10.00.

Mary McAuley, Politics and the Soviet Union. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977. 352 pp. £1.50.

G. P. van den Berg, De regering van Rusland en de Sovjet‐Unie. Leiden: 1977. 258 pp. English summary.

Richard Lowenthal, Model Or Ally: Communist Powers and the Developing Countries, London: OUP, 1977. x+400 pp. £12.95.

Martin McCauley, Khrushchev and the Development of Soviet Agriculture. The Virgin Land Programme 1953–1964. London: Macmillan, 1976. 232 pp. £10.00.

Robert W. Campbell, Trends in the Soviet Oil and Gas Industry. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press for Resources for the Future, 1976. xiv+125 pp.

Joseph S. Berliner, The Innovation Decision in Soviet Industry. Cambridge, Mass, and London: The MIT Press, 1976. ix+561 pp. £23.80.

James Riordan, Sport in Soviet Society. London: CUP, 1977. xi+435 pp. £10.00.

Robert Auty and Dimitry Obolensky (eds.), Companion to Russian Studies. Volume 2. An Introduction to Russian Language and Literature. London: CUP, 1977. 300 pp. £11.50.

Frederick C. Barghoorn, Detente and the Democratic Movement in the USSR. New York and London: The Free Press/Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1976. x+230 pp. $12.95.

Rudolf L. Tokés (ed.), Dissent in the USSR. Politics, Ideology, and People. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. xvi+464 pp. £7.75.

Alexander Yanov, Detente after Brezhnev: The Domestic Roots of Soviet Foreign Policy. Translated by Robert Kessler. (Policy Papers in International Affairs, No. 2.) Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1977. x+90 pp. $3.00.

Nirmala Joshi, Foundations of Indo‐ Soviet Relations: A Study of Non‐Official Attitudes and Contacts, 1917–1947. New Delhi: Radiant Publishers, 1975. 204 pp. Rs. 30.

J. P. Jain, Soviet Policy Towards Pakistan and Bangladesh. New Delhi: Radiant Publishers, 1974. 258 pp. Rs. 50. $11.50.

Paul E. Lydolph, Geography of the U.S.S.R. Third edition. New York: Wiley, 1977. xi+495 pp.     

Pliant and Compliant: Colonial Indian Art and Postcolonial Cinema

Walter Benjamin's signature hypothesis of 'dialectics at a standstill' rehearsed in his 'Theoretics of Knowledge, Theories of Progress' permits visual images to be elasticized from a then condition in history and culture to a now site of contemporary reality in order to be critiqued in their entirety. Putting this hypothesis to the test, Rajan juxtaposes two late eighteenth-century works of art by East India Company Painters with two late twentieth-century films by Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta to trace trajectories of orientalized desire and unspeakable pleasure as relayed along a woman's body. In all four instances, the central image of woman continues to be an insistent signifier that embodies social values, cultural prejudices and artistic ideals, which, in turn, provide critical, valuable insights into constructions of gendered, aestheticized and sexualized femininity. The image of woman , thus dialectically read, reveals that it is not simply the male colonizer who is always already the oppressor, as is the common assumption, but rather that woman as an abject signifier can be merchandised even by enlightened, postcolonial women. Such a ravaged image of woman remains, therefore, a fixed trope in the hands of male and female artists, traversing coloniality and postcoloniality, and crossing over from art to cinema, with little chance of emancipation. One strategy to grant woman full agency requires the contemporary, feminist viewer to take responsibility and couple aesthetics with an ethical tenor. According to Benjamin, ethics thus defined is a matter of personalized aesthetics. This means that each one of us is entrusted with the responsibility of demanding accountability in the creation of visual culture such that images that demean femininity, disembody female subjectivity, objectify female pleasure and delegitimize desire be judged inappropriate, as incorrect or unappealing visual images and as unavailable for appropriation.