Reconsidering the relationship between alcohol and lethal violence

Prior event-based research regarding the relationship between alcohol and violence suffers from important limitations, including the absence of a comparison group, an inappropriate comparison group, or a comparison group that could be considered appropriate but does not control for potential confounders. To overcome such limitations, we use a matched pair design. Drawing on interviews with men imprisoned for an aggravated assault or homicide committed in response to a conflict with another man, we examine matched pairs of violent and nonviolent conflicts nested within respondents. The results suggest that guns mediate the relationship between alcohol and lethal male-male violence.     

The patent lottery

A recent study by Boston academic economists James Bessen andMichael Muerer has argued that many patents are simply not worthhaving. Their case is based on the analysis of a large bodyof data. As James Bessen says, in a comment posted in responseto criticism on the IPKat weblog,

"We derived our estimatesof patent rents after reviewing 16 different papers publishedover 25 years, involving 17 different authors and several differentmethodologies.     

Familial Vehicular Murder‐Suicide

A certain number of single‐vehicle crashes into stationary roadside objects such as trees are thought to be occult suicides. However, is it possible that some cases of multiple deaths within a family in similar crashes are due to unrecognized familial murder‐suicides? A 39‐year‐old woman and her 11‐year‐old daughter are reported who died of injuries following a vehicle impact with a tree. Unusual behavior of the mother leading up to the crash, and assessment at the scene, raised the possibility of this being a nonaccidental event. However, difficulties in retrospectively determining the intent of a driver in a vehicle crash, and the nonrecording of, or lack of separate coding for murder‐suicides on registers, make determination of the incidence of these types of events extremely difficult. It may be that this is a subcategory of murder‐suicide that is underdiagnosed and so is not being registered on central motor vehicle crash databases.     

feminism,policy and women's safety during Australia's ‘war on terror’

The main argument in this article is that the Australian government in power from 1996 to November 2007 failed women's domestic security by denying the central policy role of women's organizations in the struggle against domestic violence and by successfully expunging public debate on gender issues in Australian governance, while participating in the ‘war on terror’ to guard national security. In bringing together a discussion about the war on terror and the importance of feminism for women's security, key issues about feminism, race and gender are considered. This article also explores the prevalence of violence against women and the social implications of the lack of leadership in public debate about the gendered nature of violence against women. Under the Australian government led by Prime Minister John Howard that gained power in 1996 and was defeated in 2007, women's organizations lost financial support and women's policy infrastructure was decimated. Violence against women, however, continued to increase, reaffirming women's place in Australian society as insecure and dangerous. After more than 30 years of struggle to maintain domestic violence and sexual assault as serious social policy problems, provide services, support and advocacy for women who are victims of violence and assault, women's organizations are coming to terms with a society where there is a blindness to the role of gender in violence against women.     

The application of signal detection theory to decision-making in forensic science

Signal Detection Theory (SDT) has come to be used in a wide variety of fields where noise and imperfect signals present challenges to the task of separating hits and correct rejections from misses and false alarms. The application of SDT helps illuminate and improve the quality of decision-making in those fields in a number of ways. The present article is designed to make SDT more accessible to forensic scientists by: (a) explaining what SDT is and how it works, (b) explicating the potential usefulness of SDT to forensic science, (c) illustrating SDT analysis using forensic science data, and (d) suggesting ways to gain the benefits of SDT analyses in the course of carrying out existing programs of quality assessment and other research on forensic science examinations.     

Applying a Two-Step Strategy to the Analysis of Cross-National Public Opinion Data

W. Phillips Shively Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, 1414 Social Sciences Bldg. 267 19th Ave. South, Minneapolis, MN 55455 email: kjlong{at}umich.edu (corresponding author) email: shively{at}polisci.umn.edu. In recent years, large sets of national surveys with sharedcontent have increasingly been used for cross-national opinionresearch. But scholars have not yet settled on the most flexibleand efficient models for utilizing such data. We present a two-stepstrategy for such analysis that takes advantage of the factthat in such datasets each "cluster" (i.e., country sample)is large enough to sustain separate analysis of its internalvariances and covariances. We illustrate the method by examininga puzzle of comparative electoral behavior—why does turnoutdecline rather than increase with the number of parties competingin an election (Blais and Dobryzynska 1998, for example)? Thisdiscussion demonstrates the ease with which a two-step strategyincorporates confounding variables operating at different levelsof analysis. Technical appendices demonstrate that the two-stepstrategy does not lose efficiency of estimation as comparedwith a pooling strategy.     

Detection of human proteins in buried blood using ELISA and monoclonal antibodies: towards the reliable species indentification of blood stains on buried material.

The survival of human proteins in blood stains on fragments of cloth buried in exposed soil was examined in a 15-month investigation carried out from September 1990 to December 1991. During this period there was a wide variety of weather conditions. Samples were exhumed at 4-weekly intervals for 16 weeks and finally at 65 weeks; extracts of the stains were tested for albumin and IgG using a highly specific and sensitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) performed with monoclonal antibodies. Human albumin survived well throughout the 15 months of study, but IgG could be detected only in the 4- and 8-week samples. The reactions for IgG were weaker than those for albumin, although the method's sensitivity (10 ng) was the same for each protein. Appropriate buried and non-buried control experiments were carried out using cloth, either unstained or stained with human blood or animal sera; there was no cross-reactivity between human and the other species investigated and soil did not affect the assay; under laboratory conditions, IgG and albumin survived equally well. The system's versatility was illustrated by using monoclonal anti-bovine-albumin to detect specific albumin in the extracts of buried cloth which has been stained with bovine serum. It was concluded that ELISA performed with monoclonal antibodies could be of great value in identifying blood stains for forensic purposes.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)