The role of committee systems in post-communist legislatures: a case study of the Lithuanian Seimas

European parliamentary committee systems play an important role in organising the work of legislatures so as to assure the parliamentary leadership of its agenda. At the same time, the strategic positioning of committees in the legislative process provides opportunities for chairs to potentially undo the will of the leadership. We consider the degree to which committees in the Lithuanian legislature serve the private interests of legislators or those of the parliamentary leadership. We argue that while committees most often assist the leadership in obtaining preferred legislative outcomes, chairs on occasion have been able to change proposals or even frustrate the parliamentary leadership of governing coalitions.     

A Theoretical examination of police entry-level uncorrected visual acuity standards

Police organizations function in a dynamic environment that requires management to make adjustments to constant changes. The focus of this paper is on entry-level uncorrected vision entry standards that are being affected by recent technological advancements in the optical field. Extreme policy variances exist relative to - these requirements and many of the more rigid policies are grounded in unrealistic foundations. Many of these foundations relate to problems relevant to spectacles. Additionally, these standards are based on very remote events. An analysis of these policies and policy recommendations are presented in this paper.     

Multiple deaths resulting from shipboard exposure to trichlorotrifluoroethane

During the course of dockside ship maintenance, a compartment was partially flooded with tricholotrifluoroethane gas. One sailor entered the compartment, collapsed, and was then rescued by two other men. All three victims then climbed a 11-m (36-ft) ladder and collapsed. They all experienced a rapid development of cardiac arrest. We report on the pathologic, toxicologic, and pathophysiologic aspects of the incident.     

Risky Inference: Unobserved Treatment Effects in Conflict Studies

This article illustrates the importance of testing empirical models in samples appropriate to the theories the models are intended to test. While social science appears to mandate that we prefer general theories to limited ones, the generality of a theory rests in its logical application to a set of observations, not solely to its statistical survival in a large data set. Theories in international relations, especially those linking domestic turmoil and international conflict, are advancing, but are sometimes applied to samples larger than the related theories indicate. This paper examines the statistical consequences of estimation in overexpansive samples with unmodeled treatment effects; we argue that samples containing cases that cannot experience the causal phenomenon in question produce unmodeled treatment effects, and we reexamine three published articles whose samples are perhaps broader than their theories suggest they should be. The empirical analyses demonstrate that overexpansive samples can produce somewhat misleading results: the new models produce interesting findings that emerge as treatment effects are identified.