Programme Evaluation and Effectiveness Auditing in Sweden: The Changing Swedish Policy Style*

Modern governments must increase their capacity for analysing and evaluating public programmes. Evaluations, however, take place in a political context and many policies have unstated political goals. Sweden appears to have a highly developed evaluation and effectiveness auditing system and the Swedish case is instructive, not only because of its experience in the evaluation field, but also because it illustrates the changing policy style. Two main agencies are involved in the evaluation process and they both experience some difficulties in their evaluation studies. These difficulties stem in part from the political environment in which they both operate but also relate to their own organisational styles. The resource squeeze could bring broad environmental charges which could be conducive to a greater influence for the two agencies.     

Sudden, unexpected death due to "pineal apoplexy"

A 20-year-old woman had a minute vascular malformation in the wall of a glial cyst of the pineal body. Bleeding into the cyst lumen caused rapid expansion of the pineal body, resulting in compression of the midbrain and her sudden, unexpected death.     

The Chocolate Conundrum: A Simple Simulation of a Canonical Management Problem

This article describes an exercise that simulates one of the most famous of all human management problems: the “tragedy of the commons.” Coined by Garret Hardin in 1968, the term refers to any situation in which people acting rationally to meet their individual interests wind up depleting a shared resource to the detriment of all participants. Because these patterns arise in many real‐world situations — from global warming and natural resource management to free‐rider problems in markets and organizations — this exercise may interest a broad range of negotiation scholars, teachers, and practitioners. The Chocolate Conundrum is a simple exercise that uses candy to demonstrate the tension between individual and collective interests that arises in all social dilemmas. Because these dynamics also arise in many real situations, the exercise can be a powerful teaching tool for instructors in management, public policy, sociology, economics, and many other social science disciplines. Unlike some other simulations of collective action problems, this exercise is simple to administer, requires no computation or tallying of results, and works with a broad range of audiences and group sizes.     

Composition of bacillus species in aerosols from 11 U.S. cities

A PCR-based heteroduplex assay was used to determine the presence and composition of Bacillus species in 11,059 Environmental Protection Agency PM2.5 aerosol samples from 11 U.S. cities. The assay differentiated three groups: Type A containing Bacillus anthracis and very closely related, often pathogenic, Bacillus cereus and Bacillus thuringiensis strains; Type B containing other B. cereus and B. thuringiensis strains; and a third group of more-distantly related Bacillus species. Eight of the 11 cities were positive for Bacillus species in 50% or more of the samples, and the percent of aerosol samples that contained the HD Type A group ranged from 3% to 32%. Cities from the eastern half of the United States generally contained a higher frequency and broader diversity of Bacillus species than the western half of the United States. Positive samples were detected throughout the year. These results have implications for pathogen detection in environmental samples, understanding the natural evolution of new pathogenic strains, and incidence of infection caused by strains of the B. cereus subgroup.     

Simultaneous determination of total human and male DNA using a duplex real-time PCR assay

A single duplex assay to determine both the amount of total human DNA and the amount of male DNA in a forensic sample has been developed. This assay is based on TaqMan technology and uses the multicopy Alu sequence to quantitate total human DNA and the multicopy DYZ5 sequence to quantitate Y chromosomal (male) DNA. The assay accepts a wide concentration range of input DNA (2 muL of 64 ng/microL to 0.5 pg/microL), and also allows detection of PCR failure. The PCR product sizes Alu (127 bp) and DYZ5 (137bp) approximate that of the smaller short tandem repeats (STRs) which should make the assay predictive of STR success with degraded DNA. The assay was optimized for probe/primer concentrations and BSA addition and validated on its reproducibility, on its human specificity, on its nonethnic variability, for artificial mixtures and adjudicated casework, for the effect of inhibitors and for state of DNA degradation. This assay should prove very usual in forensic analyses because knowing the relative amounts of male versus female DNA can allow the examiner to decide which samples may yield the most probative value in a case or direct the samples to methods that would yield the greatest information.