The role of global cities in land grabs

Key trends link a globally connected urban archipelago and its hinterlands, warranting new studies of power in its most contemporary forms. This article locates land power and where that power is exercised – looking at the burgeoning global land rush from the perspective of cities. Urbanisation continues to drive vast political transitions, uprooting longstanding agrarian modes of living while creating myriad inequalities within cities. Are the world’s most powerful agglomerations active agents in this transformation? Answering affirmatively, the article reframes urbanisation as a vast, global geopolitical transfer of power from rural to urban. Leading global cities like New York, London, Hong Kong, Chicago and Singapore are not merely impressive collections of factor endowments. They are also sites of concentrated power with coercive influences beyond municipal boundaries. The article asks how cities project power in the contemporary global system. Juxtaposing data on global connectivity with the location strategies of private firms, we learn that the world’s most successful global cities are also sources of exploitative accumulations of land.     

Social Movements and the Construction of Crisis Actors: Collective Responsibility,Identity, and Governance

This article examines the Europeanization of social movements following the European sovereign debt crisis. It develops a theoretical framework to measure degrees of social movement Europeanization, incorporating targets, participants, and issue frame dimensions of mobilization. Europeanization of social movements occurs when they collaborate with similar movements in other countries, claim a European identity, invoke Europe-wide solidarity, contest authorities beyond the state and ascribe responsibility for solving the crisis to European Union (EU). By targeting EU authorities, social movements may contribute to the construction of the EU as a crisis actor and through deliberative processes define the roles and identities of such actors.     

Public capital stock and interstate variations in manufacturing efficiency

This study focuses on the role of public capital stock in contributing to interstate differences in productive efficiency in manufacturing. Our motivation is to assess the role of public capital as a source of persistent regional variations in efficiency, and thus determine if public infrastructure policies might reasonably be expected to alter the competitive environment of a state's manufacturing sector. We use a stochastic frontier production function model, explicitly incorporating infrastructure capital, to examine the relative performance of the aggregate manufacturing sector across states and over time. We calculate an index of productive efficiency and estimate the determinants of statewide variations in it. These results show that variations in per capita infrastructure stocks significantly affect manufacturing efficiency. Considering the behavior of public capital as both a direct and an indirect input furthers our understanding of the role of infrastructure and its implications for regional economic development policies.     

Motivations for Social Media Use: Associations with Social Media Engagement and Body Satisfaction and Well-Being among Adolescents

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Adolescents are spending considerable time on social media, yet it is unclear whether motivations for social media use drive different forms of social media...     

The Prospective Impact of Family Functioning and Parenting Practices on Court-Involved Youth’s Substance Use and Delinquent Behavior

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Court-involved youth exhibit high rates of psychiatric symptoms, substance use, and delinquency, yet little is known about the contributing roles of caregiver and...     

Sample Mining and Data Mining: Combined Real-Time and Retrospective Approaches for the Identification of Emerging Novel Psychoactive Substances

Novel psychoactive substances (NPS) are synthetic drugs that pose serious public health and safety concerns. A multitude of NPS have been identified in the United States, often implicated in forensic investigations. The most common and effective manner for identifying NPS is by use of mass spectrometry and the true utility lies within nontargeted acquisition techniques. During this study, a liquid chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LC-QTOF-MS) assay was developed, validated, and implemented for forensic toxicology testing. A SCIEX TripleTOF™ 5600 + with SWATH^® acquisition was used. Resulting data were compared against an extensive library database containing more than 800 compounds. The LC-QTOF-MS assay was applied to the reanalysis of biological sample extracts to discover emergent NPS. More than 3,000 sample extracts were analyzed, and more than 20 emerging NPS were detected for the first time. Among these were isopropyl-U-47700, 3,4-methylenedioxy-U-47700, fluorofuranylfentanyl, N-methyl norfentanyl, 2F-deschloroketamine, 3,4-methylenedioxy-alpha-PHP, eutylone, and N-ethyl hexedrone.     

Evaluating the Potential for Unintentional Occupational Exposure to Fentanyl and Fentanyl Analogues Among Medicolegal Death Investigators and Autopsy Technicians

Recent increases in deaths in the United States from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and fentanyl analogues (fentanyls) have raised concerns about possible occupational exposures to these potent agents. Medicolegal death investigators and autopsy suite staff might perform job tasks involving exposure to fentanyls. The potential for exposure to fentanyls among medicolegal death investigators and autopsy technicians at a state medical examiner's office was evaluated through review of caseload characteristics, injury and illness logs, and procedures and policies and discussions with management and employee representatives. The evaluation showed that this medical examiner's office had low potential for work-related exposure to fentanyls; its standard operating procedures and personal protective equipment requirements should reduce the potential for occupational exposure. Medicolegal death investigation agencies can develop and implement guidance to control exposures and provide workforce education and training to reduce the potential for work-related exposure to fentanyls.     

The Scharff technique: training military intelligence officers to elicit information from small cells of sources

ABSTRACT

Studies have demonstrated the efficacy of the Scharff technique for gathering human intelligence, but little is known about how this efficacy might vary among different samples of practitioners. In this training study we examined a sample of military officers (n?=?37). Half was trained in the Scharff technique and compared against officers receiving no Scharff training. All officers received the same case file describing two sources holding information about a terrorist attack. University students (n?=?74) took the role of the semi-cooperative sources. Scharff-trained officers adhered to the training as they (1) aimed to establish the ‘knowing-it-all’ illusion, (2) posed claims as a means of eliciting information, and (3) asked fewer explicit questions. The ‘untrained’ officers asked many explicit questions, questioned the reliability of the provided information, pressured the source, and displayed disappointment with the source's contribution. Scharff-trained officers were perceived as less eager to gather information and left their sources with the impression of having provided comparatively less new information, but collected a similar amount of new information as their untrained colleagues. The present paper both replicates and advances previous work in the field, and marks the Scharff technique as a promising technique for gathering human intelligence.     

Parenting Coordination and Confidentiality: A (Not‐so) Delicate Balance

This article describes the current state and range of information protection in the growing number of states and Canadian provinces that employ parenting coordination in an effort to reduce repeat custody litigation. The predominant approach—in which what is revealed during the process is not confidential—is analyzed in terms of its compatibility with the parenting coordinator's multiple tasks of educating parents, seeking to facilitate agreements, and, if necessary, providing the court with a report, a recommended decision, or an arbitrated result. Using a case scenario with multiple parts, the article then examines such confidentiality schemes in practice by providing an action‐oriented series of questions that illustrate how much of this topic must be resolved through a parenting coordinator's exercise of discretion in the absence of rule clarity. The article then raises a number of policy questions about whether current parenting coordination confidentiality norms strike the optimal or even the correct balance on information protection and concludes by identifying several policy options that might address these questions.