The effect of various stain carriers on the quality and quantity of DNA extracted from dried bloodstains

Bloodstains were made with 200 microliters blood on each of 11 different common substrates to examine the effect of the stain carrier on the amount and quality of DNA recoverable. High-molecular-weight DNA was extracted from all samples after 2 days. The yield of DNA from each sample varied considerably, not only between the different stain carriers but also within a given category. With a DNA yield of up to 10 micrograms, paper, glass, nylon, wood, smooth leather and wool gave the best results, followed by blue denim and wallpaper (up to 6 micrograms), cotton fabric and carpeting (up to 4 micrograms) and suede (up to 2 micrograms). For several stain carriers the DNA-containing solution was contaminated by chemical substances, which in the case of the blue denim, suede, and carpet samples inhibited the digestion of the DNA with restriction enzymes and prevented DNA typing. The different textures of the stain carriers tested and (as for varying yields on the same carrier) the differing degree of loss of DNA during extraction and the physiological variation in the number of leukocytes in human blood are discussed as possible reasons for the wide range of variation in the amounts of DNA it was possible to extract.     

Parents' Reactions to Child Day Care Organizations: The Influence of Perceptions of Procedures and the Role of Organizations' Trustworthiness

On the basis of the uncertainty management model, we argue here that when people are uncertain about an organization's trustworthiness, they may resolve the question how they should react toward the organization by relying on their perceptions of the organization's procedures. As a consequence, we predicted that the reactions of parents whose child was in a day care center would be strongly influenced by their perceptions of the procedures used by the organization that was responsible for their children's day care when the parents would be uncertain about the organization's trustworthiness. However, when parents would be certain that the organization could be trusted they would be less in need of procedural information, yielding less strong effects of perceived procedure on parents' reactions. The findings of a survey study corroborate this line of reasoning. In the discussion it is argued that these findings suggest that people especially rely on their perceptions of procedures when they are uncertain about important aspects of their lives, such as the trustworthiness of organizations that are responsible for their children's day care.     

Evolving Market Efficiency with an Application to Some Bulgarian Shares

With new technically advanced methods and computers at our disposal, the efficient market hypothesis is once again being debated. At the same time, we are witnessing an unprecedented growth in both existing and new financial markets. These new markets are often in economies which have just recently embraced free market economics; we term these stock markets infant markets. Such stock markets are obviously not efficient in allocating the supply of savings to productive capital. We do not test whether or not these infant markets are informationally efficient, but instead examine whether and how they are becoming more efficient. We propose modelling the excess returns of individual securities using a multi-factor model with time-varying coefficients and generalised auto-regressive conditional heteroskedastic (GARCH) errors. If the markets are becoming more informationally efficient or the agents are learning, we would expect this to manifest itself as the time-varying coefficients becoming more stable as time increases. We test our model using data on four Bulgarian shares. First, we estimate an AR(2) model and a GARCH-M(1,1) model for the shares. Then, we estimated our AR(2) model with time varying coefficients and GARCH type errors. We find varying levels of efficiency and varying speeds of movement towards efficiency within our sample of four shares.     

WOMEN,RACE, AND CRIME *

This paper explores the capacity of alternative theoretical perspectives to explain the self-reported criminality of black and white young adult females. When criminal involvement is regressed on the theory operation-alizations separately by race, a key difference emerges: For white women, significant effects are clustered in the social-psychological theory groups (bonding, attitudes, and maturation), but for the black women the social-psychological variables have only scattered and inconsistent eflects. Instead, for black women structural indicators emerge as the important predictors of criminal involvement.