Contributors to this issue

Contributors to this issue     

Information Wants to be Property: Legal Commodification of E-commerce Assets

In the global information age, information per se is becoming one of the most valuable assets of many businesses. Because of this, the laws of many jurisdictions have started evolving to extend the protections for such information against unauthorised access, use and/or interference. These legal moves tend to have the direct or indirect effect of 'propertizing' aspects of the information in question. Recent moves in the area of copyright law in particular have shown a marked trend towards increased legal support for the commodification of commercially valuable information. Examples of this trend can be seen in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States and the Database Directive in the European Union. The following discussion examines this phenomenon and raises some questions about the desirable limits of legal commodification of information in this context.     

The legal control of drunken driving: A comment on methodological concerns in assessing deterrent effectiveness

Appearing in this volume are papers by Votey and Phillips, Ray, and Votey that raise basic questions about the effectiveness of efforts to reduce drunken driving through legal controls implemented in the criminal justice system. The primary issues of extent, source, and duration of any effect are raised by those authors. This paper discusses the concern for deterrence expressed by Phillips, et al., and particularly focuses on some methodological problems in demonstrating the deterrent effectiveness of criminal sanctions on drunken driving.     

The effect of attending full‐day kindergarten on English learner students

A significant and growing English learner (EL) population attends public schools in the United States. Evidence suggests they are at a disadvantage when entering school and their achievement lags behind non‐EL students. Some educators have promoted full‐day kindergarten programs as especially helpful for EL students. We take advantage of the large EL population and variation in full‐day kindergarten implementation in the Los Angeles Unified School District to examine the impact of full‐day kindergarten on academic achievement, retention, and English language fluency using difference‐in‐differences models. We do not find signficant effects of full‐day kindergarten on most academic outcomes and English fluency through second grade. However, we find that EL students attending full‐day kindergarten were 5 percentage points less likely to be retained before second grade and there are differential effects for several outcomes by student and school characteristics. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Educating for active compliance: discursive constructions in citizenship education

This article examines the discursive construction of ‘active citizenship’ within recent civics curriculum documents across three provinces in Canada. New secondary school civics curricula have emerged across liberal democratic states since the year 2000, presumably in response to the perception of youth as disengaged from political involvement. Many of the new curricula subsequently emphasize ‘active’ engagement within the polity. The central task of this paper is to better understand what such ‘active citizenship’ actually means, via the methodological tool of discourse analysis. Engaging a theoretical frame that incorporates Foucauldian governmentality theory and cultural theories of the role of the state in creating subjectivities, the paper ultimately argues that the ‘active citizen’ of contemporary civics curricula is, in fact, a deeply neoliberal subject. The article then draws on feminist theories of citizenship in order to assess the forms of exclusion that the curriculum documents inadvertently create, arguing that they ultimately participate in a long tradition of devaluing such elements of citizenship as relationality and emotional ties. We conclude that one of the fundamental goals of citizenship education – to expand access to citizenship participation for all – has failed.     

Enhancing Witness Memory with Focused Meditation and Eye-Closure: Assessing the Effects of Misinformation

Despite the decline in popularity of hypnosis as an investigative interviewing technique, this paper builds on previous research showing that some of the techniques employed in traditional hypnotic interviewing may still be useful in the development of simple, brief memory facilitation procedures for use by the police. Three experiments are described that investigate the effects of a short Focused Meditation with eye-closure technique in situations where participants are presented with misleading information. In the first study, which utilized a standard misinformation paradigm, a significant memory facilitation effect was shown with Focused Meditation, though the effect was not significant for eye-closure alone. There were no increases in errors when the Meditation and eye-closure procedures were used alone or in combination. The second experiment showed that a combined Focused Meditation with eye-closure technique reduced misinformation effects associated with fictitious events, and a third showed that the same technique reduced interrogative suggestibility effects as measured by the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale, whilst facilitating free recall memory. It is concluded that a Focused Meditation with eye-closure technique may potentially have applications in the field where brief alternatives to the Cognitive Interview are required.