Reconceptualizing elder abuse: treating the disease of senior community exclusion

This article focuses on the phenomenon of elder abuse, which is one of the paramount symptoms of the larger community's failure to address the social, medical, and legal needs of the senior populace. Although there have been multidisciplinary efforts to address this problem, they are not responsive to the needs of the senior population itself In response, the authors propose a model that takes into account the specific concerns of local senior communities and provides seniors and their stakeholder providers a stable infrastructure to ensure open, consistent, and effective participation and delivery of services.     

Visual attention and expertise for forensic signature analysis

Eye tracking was used to measure visual attention of nine forensic document examiners (FDEs) and 12 control subjects on a blind signature comparison trial. Subjects evaluated 32 questioned signatures (16 genuine, eight disguised, and eight forged) which were compared, on screen, with four known signatures of the specimen provider while their eye movements, response times, and opinions were recorded. FDEs' opinions were significantly more accurate than controls, providing further evidence of FDE expertise. Both control and FDE subjects looked at signature features in a very similar way and the difference in the accuracy of their opinions can be accounted for by different cognitive processing of the visual information that they extract from the images. In a separate experiment the FDEs re-examined a reordered set of the same 32 questioned signatures. In this phase each signature was presented for only 100 msec to test if eye movements are relevant in forming opinions; performance significantly dropped, but not to chance levels indicating that the examination process comprises a combination of both global and local feature extraction strategies.     

The use of mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I gene (COI) to differentiate two UK blowfly species -- Calliphora vicina and Calliphora vomitoria

Traditionally identification of forensically important insects has been carried out based upon morphological differences between species. However insect evidence found at a crime scene may on occasion be difficult to distinguish by morphological techniques and under these circumstances another method of accurate identification is required. This work utilises a cytochrome oxidase I partial mitochondrial gene region (COI) to distinguish the two of the main UK blowfly species -- Calliphora vicina (Robineau Desvoidy) and Calliphora vomitoria (Linnaeus) (Diptera:Calliphoridae). Seventeen interspecific differences in COI sequence were located. Use of the restriction enzyme SfcI on this gene region provides a simple method for distinguishing between C. vicina and C. vomitoria.     

The rally 'round the flag effect in U.S. foreign policy crises, 1950–1985

We calculate the rally 'round the flag effect (Mueller, 1970, 1973) for all 41 U.S. foreign policy crises, 1950–1985, identified by the International Crisis Behavior Project (Wilkenfeld, Brecher, and Moser, 1988). The mean change in the president's approval rating is surprisingly small: 1.4 percent among all respondents. The greatest influences on the rallying effect of a crisis are whether or not the United States is involved in an ongoing war and, especially, theNew York Times's coverage of the president's major response to a crisis. When a major response is reported in the headlines, the rally is more than 8 percentage points greater,ceteris paribus, than when it is not reported on the front page. TheNew York Times's reporting is influenced by the nature of the president's response, the efforts of his administration to publicize his actions, the degree of Soviet involvement, the location of the crisis, and the willingness of opposition leaders to take a newsworthy position regarding the president's performance.     

The professional politics of the austerity debate: A comparative field analysis of the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund

How do different professional structures shape the economic ideas that international economic organizations use to prescribe policy recommendations or derive legitimacy and authority for them? The comparative professional field analysis proposed herein deploys a novel combination of content, network and regression analysis to uncover the precise role of different qualifications, experiences and hierarchies in shaping the economic expertise invoked by the European Central Bank's and the International Monetary Fund's main policy documents, with a specific focus on debates over fiscal consolidation in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008. The findings challenge much of the scholarship about how economic ideas diffuse across professional domains and where change on macroeconomic policy in international economic organizations is likely to come from. As such, the article should be of interest to scholarship on international bureaucracies, the politics of professional knowledge and the international political economy of fiscal consolidation.     

A General Empirical Law of Public Budgets: A Comparative Analysis

We examine regularities and differences in public budgeting in comparative perspective. Budgets quantify collective political decisions made in response to incoming information, the preferences of decision makers, and the institutions that structure how decisions are made. We first establish that the distribution of budget changes in many Western democracies follows a non-Gaussian distribution, the power function. This implies that budgets are highly incremental, yet occasionally are punctuated by large changes. This pattern holds regardless of the type of political system—parliamentary or presidential—and for level of government. By studying the power function's exponents we find systematic differences for budgetary increases versus decreases (the former are more punctuated) in most systems, and for levels of government (local governments are less punctuated). Finally, we show that differences among countries in the coefficients of the general budget law correspond to differences in formal institutional structures. While the general form of the law is probably dictated by the fundamental operations of human and organizational information processing, differences in the magnitudes of the law's basic parameters are country- and institution-specific .