Turnout in recent American presidential elections

The well-noted decline in the participation of Americans in presidential elections since the early sixties reversed in the 1984 election, although only slightly. An improved national mood appears to have contributed little to increasing turnout. However, the gap in participation between the wealthier and poorer widened, while that between men and women narrowed and reversed direction, and belonging to a group associated with an identity affected participation more powerfully. Taken together, these findings indicate shifts in patterns of turnout corresponding to shifts in the lines of politicized interests. Analysis of the participation of blacks finds little evidence for electoral mobilization by the Rainbow Coalition in 1984.     

Information resource management in Florida: A primer

This article presents a brief history of the development of information resource management (IRM) in Florida. The principal organizations involved in IRM oversight described in this article guide the management of critical information technologies such as computers and telecommunications equipment. Entering the next century, state agencies must maintain their leadership given the current projected growth in the state's population and service demand. Effective IRM key to their continued success.     

Relative Affordability of Health Insurance Premiums under CHIP Expansion Programs and the ACA

Affordability is integral to the success of health care reforms aimed at ensuring universal access to health insurance coverage, and affordability determinations have major policy and practical consequences. This article describes factors that influenced the determination of affordability benchmarks and premium-contribution requirements for Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) expansions in three states that sought to universalize access to coverage for youth. It also compares subsidy levels developed in these states to the premium subsidy schedule under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for health insurance plans purchased through an exchange. We find sizeable variability in premium-contribution requirements for children's coverage as a percentage of family income across the three states and in the progressivity and regressivity of the premium-contribution schedules developed. These findings underscore the ambiguity and subjectivity of affordability standards. Further, our analyses suggest that while the ACA increases the affordability of family coverage for families with incomes below 400 percent of the federal poverty level, the evolution of CHIP over the next five to ten years will continue to have significant implications for low-income families.     

Childhood Violence Exposure: Cumulative and Specific Effects on Adult Mental Health

Childhood exposure to violence and victimization is a significant public health problem, with potentially long-lasting, deleterious effects on adult mental health. Using a longitudinal study design, 123 young adults—identified in adolescence as at-risk for high school dropout—were examined for the effects of multi-domain childhood victimization on emotional distress and suicide risk, net of adolescent risk and protective factors, including family dysfunction. The hypothesis that higher levels of cumulative childhood victimization would be significantly associated with mental health maladjustment in young adulthood was confirmed by the analysis. However, the victimization predictors of adult emotional distress were different than the predictors of adult suicide risk. These findings indicate the need for prevention and intervention approaches that include thorough assessment, and focus on the childhood and adolescent problem areas that are most consequential for long-term psychological well-being.     

Recovery of DNA and fingerprints from touched documents

This study investigated the various factors affecting DNA profiling from DNA recovered from fingerprints deposited on paper before and after fingerprint enhancement treatments. The DNeasy^® plant mini kit (QIAGEN^®) was found to improve DNA recovery from paper by over 150% compared with the QIAamp^® mini kit. A significant decrease in the amount of DNA recovered was observed following treatment with DFO and/or Ninhydrin. This decrease in yield did not have a comparably significant effect on the quality of the SGM Plus™ profiles. Furthermore, this study found that whilst certain paper types, such as newspaper, magazine and filter paper allowed for the good recovery of DNA, common office paper and white card, strongly interfered with the recovery of DNA resulting in poor quality profiles.     

Hair analysis for drugs of abuse. Hair color and race differentials or systematic differences in drug preferences?

There is currently a debate in the literature on chemical drug analysis concerning the contribution of biophysical attributes associated with specimens and specimen donors to assay outcome. In recent years this debate has focused on hair analysis, but has in the past also been raised in urinalysis interpretation. In this article we examine several aspects of that controversy. First, we present data regarding the effects of hair color on the distribution of positive hair testing results for three drug classes. We compare these results to negative hair samples from comparable donors. This data is derived from head hair from preemployment donors that was classified according to seven visual color categories. We determined the distribution of colors for hair samples devoid of any of three assayed drugs (amphetamines, cocaine, and cannabinoids). Subsequently, this distribution was compared with the distributions for hairs that had tested positive for amphetamines, cocaine or cannabinoids. We examined a total of 2000 randomly selected samples; 500 negative hair samples and 500 positive samples for each of three drugs: cannabinoids, cocaine, and amphetamine. We also evaluated ethnic/racial factors in relation to positive urinalyses for various ethnic/racial groups. We examined approximately 4000 urine specimens from two different groups, each constituting around 2000 specimens. In addition to ethnicity/race and urinalysis outcome, we also examined the relationship between the hair color distributions of urine donors and the corresponding urinalysis results for the three drug classes. We also compared them to drug-negative samples. Our summary impression is that the observed outcome patterns were largely consistent with differences in drug preferences among the various societal groups. There was little evidence of a pattern attributable to hair color bias alone or selective binding of drugs to hair of a particular color. Likewise, there was no discernible pattern associated with race or ethnicity that would lend support to a "race effect" in drug analysis.