Economic Interests and Threat Assessment in the US Congress, 1890–1914

Why do some domestic actors see the international environment as a threatening place populated by untrustworthy powers, when others find opportunities for peaceful cooperation in the same conditions? Because these actors confront the same international environment, the reasons for their divergent evaluations must rest on differences in their own beliefs and interests. In this article, we consider the impact of societal interests in trade and trade protection on elite assessments of the international environment. We examine evaluations of the international environment in speeches given in the US Congress during naval appropriations debates between 1890 and 1914. The manufacturing sector’s interest in trade protection led political leaders who represented manufacturing regions to offer more negative assessments of the international environment, while those representing export-oriented agricultural areas of the country gave more positive evaluations. These effects were roughly comparable to those associated with party, as well as individual-level characteristics, such as having served as a military officer.     

A sensitive and simple assay of saliva on stamps

Identification of saliva on stamps or envelope flaps remains yet a not widely studied problem. In most forensic laboratories it is seldom carried out, but this fact does not reduce the importance of the assay. Most authors consider amylase a sufficiently specific marker of the presence of saliva; really, the only other human body fluid that contains high amounts of this enzyme is the pancreatic juice (and therefore feces). Here we present a simple and sensitive assay for the determination of alpha-amylase that uses a commercially available and well-known substrate. It is hydrolyzed by amylase with the production of soluble blue fragments, that can be measured by photometry, obtaining objective results. The presented assay identifies 1 X 10(-6) diluted saliva or that present on 0.5 mg of a stamp; 16-year-old samples can also be identified. Intra-assay and day-to-day CV resulted in 10.8% and 13.7%, respectively. Owing to the high sensitivity of the test, handling samples or reagents can introduce contamination with saliva traces, giving false-positive results. Addition of EDTA 0.1 mol/l to the incubation mixture, lowering the sensitivity to 1 X 10(-3) diluted saliva, overcomes this problem.     

Struggling against suicide: the need for an integrative approach

Transcultural comparisons would be beneficial for both our understanding of suicide phenomena and the setting up of preventative strategies. Changes in attitude throughout history, gender and age differences, socio-economic factors, influence of race and ethnicity, and the impact of religion are among the aspects mentioned in this article. All of them can actually have a considerable effect on suicide rates, and all of them should be taken into account when interpreting suicide trends and designing antisuicide strategies. In fact, both risk and protective factors may vary remarkably in different cultures. The need for an integrative approach is evident today more than ever, and this fact calls for more concerted and coordinated, multidisciplinary approaches to suicide prevention.     

Utilized coefficient of friction during walking: static estimates exceed measured values

This study compared utilized coefficient of friction (COF) measured during nonslip pedestrian gait to estimated utilized COF values calculated using anthropometric (i.e., leg length) and stride characteristic data (i.e., impact angle, step length). Twenty healthy adults walked at slow, medium, and fast speeds with kinematic and kinetic data recorded simultaneously. Estimated and measured impact angle varied with walking speed, with greater angles evident with faster speeds (p < 0.001 and p < 0.05, respectively). The estimated impact angle was greater than the measured impact angle (p < 0.05). Estimated and measured peak utilized COF values varied with walking speed, with higher utilized COF values evident with faster speeds (p < 0.001 and p = 0.001, respectively). Estimated utilized COF values were 86, 118, and 131% greater than measured peak utilized COF values for slow, medium, and fast speeds, respectively (p < 0.001). Higher estimated utilized COF values varied moderately with increased measured peak utilized COF values (r = 0.522; p < 0.001). These data suggest that impact angle and step length alone cannot be used to accurately assess the utilized COF on level walking surfaces.     

Forensic applications of infrared chemical imaging: multi-layered paint chips

This paper examines the potential of infrared chemical (hyperspectral) imaging as a technique for the forensic analysis of automotive paint chips in particular, and multicomponent (e.g., layered) samples in general. Improved sample preparation procedures for the infrared analysis of paint chips are detailed, with the recommendation that where mounting resins are chemically incompatible with the sample, it is better to mount and section the sample in a soft wax from which the sections can be removed and pressed into a KBr disk for transmission analysis. Infrared chemical images of multilayered paint chips have been successfully obtained, with the chief advantage over conventional infrared analysis being that thousands of infrared spectra are collected in a few minutes across the whole sample, at a spatial resolution of around 5 microm. As with conventional infrared spectroscopy, chemical species can be identified from their spectra, but the wealth of information available can be also extracted in a number of different ways that make multicomponent spectral (and hence chemical) comparisons between two samples easy to visualize and understand. In one approach, the infrared chemical images of two paint chips being compared side-by-side can be viewed as a "movie," in which each frame is an intensity map of the two samples at a given wavenumber (frequency) value. In another approach, the spectra (pixels) in the image files are classified into chemically similar groups, resulting in a "cluster" image that makes it possible to simultaneously compare all of the layers in two paint chips. These methods are applicable to other multicomponent samples, and also to other chemical imaging techniques.