Private Interests Seeking Punishment: Prosecution Brought by Private Individuals and Groups in Spain

This article centers on the study of the Spanish private prosecution system. It is an attempt to highlight both its theoretical potential and its practical dysfunctions. This type of lay participation in criminal matters is often seen as a way to strengthen democracy or to legitimate justice, opinions that the author rejects. Although private prosecution may work as a safety valve against the public prosecutor's inactivity, the introduction of private interests in the penal process may distort its true significance and function. Private prosecution can become a Trojan horse within the system.     

Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Education in the Age of the MOOC

Even as online learning is increasingly embraced by institutions of higher education, the past decade has seen the arrival of yet another new educational vehicle: massive online open courses (MOOCs). These courses are designed to disseminate knowledge at an unprecedented scale — even as they engender concerns about quality, learning efficacy, and the future of higher education. In this article, I discuss the MOOC phenomenon and describe a MOOC on negotiation that I developed and taught, exploring the advantages that such a course offers for negotiation and conflict resolution education in particular.     

Using Spatial,Temporal and Evidence‐status Data to Improve Ballistic Imaging Performance

Firearms identification imaging systems help solve crimes by comparing newly acquired images of cartridge casings or bullets to a database of images obtained from past crime scenes. We formulate an optimization problem that bases its matching decisions not only on the similarity between pairs of images, but also on the time and spatial location of each new acquisition and each database entry. The objective is to maximize the detection probability subject to a constraint on the false positive rate. We use data on all cartridge casings matches detected in Israel during 2006–2008 to estimate most of the model parameters. We estimate matching accuracy from two different studies and predict that the optimal use of extraneous information would increase the detection probability from 0.931 to 0.987 and from 0.707 to 0.844, respectively. These improvements are achieved by favoring pairs of images that are closer together in space and time.     

Facing into the wind's teeth: An interview with hal pepinsky

Editor's Note: The title of the interview comes from a poem by William Carlos Williams entitled The Manoeuvre. There Williams talks about seeing two starlings, just before alighting, turning in the air together backwards--but what got to him, he says, was that in doing so, they faced "into the wind's teeth." Commenting on the poem, Denise Levertov points out that, while it is a celebration of life, it also tells us that life sometimes requires adroit manoeuvering, its fullness emerging when we work not against but in cooperation with that which makes it most difficult. The interview speaks to this throughout.     

The Place of Human Rights in American Efforts to Expand and Universalize Healthcare

This article explores the very limited cases historically in the twentieth century when human rights was used in American policy debate as a defending principle for the provision of government-guaranteed universal healthcare. It discusses these cases and examines various reasons as to why this is so, noting the major emphasis in American political culture on negative rather than positive liberty. It examines the shift in political culture from the Roosevelt, Truman, and Johnson eras that embraced social and economic rights and defined them as such to the post-Reagan era when conservative ideologies were ascendant. These ideologies reject the legitimacy of social and economic rights and remain dominant in the United States. It comparatively situates the American refusal to consider universal healthcare a human right with European affirmations of such a right and to those found in various treaties of international law. Finally, it analyzes how Barack Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—while not adopting the rhetoric of human rights does, functionally, enable as a matter of public policy an entitlement to healthcare.     

Effect of the broadcast of a television documentary about a teenager's suicide in Israel on suicidal behavior and methods

Portrayals of suicide in the media are controversial because they may impact on suicide rates and methods. The aim of this study was to analyze the effect of the broadcast of a television documentary wherein an adolescent girl is interviewed about her suicide plan and subsequently dies by suicide. National suicide rates during the 8 weeks prior to the program and the 4 weeks following it were compared to the same periods in the previous year. There was no significant difference in the rates of completed and attempted suicides before and after the program. There was a shift toward the method used in the film after the broadcast, but it was found to be nonspecific to that year. A significant decrease was noted in the mean age of suicide attempters in the last promotional week prior to the broadcast compared to the previous year (p = .032). These preliminary findings suggest that the repeated televised promotion of a documentary on suicide may raise the risk of suicide in vulnerable populations. Further investigations in bigger populations are needed.     

Games,Claims, and New Frames: Rethinking the Use of Simulation in Negotiation Education

Negotiation educators have long considered the use of role‐play simulations as an essential classroom teaching method, and have had high expectations regarding their suitability and efficacy for teaching. In this article, we review the literature to examine the degree to which simulations deliver on these perceived benefits, finding that simulations enjoy only limited advantages over other teaching methods. We note three trends that have developed as part of this reevaluation process: improving the way simulations are conducted, deemphasizing the use of simulations as a teaching tool while seeking new methods, and finding paradigm‐changing uses for simulations. With regard to this last trend, we describe our own experiments assigning students to design their own simulations, rather than participate in them as role players. Among other benefits of the design method, we found that designers showed greater improvements in concept learning and motivation than did role players.