Patent Related Indicators for Assessing Knowledge-Generating Institutions: Towards a Contextualised Approach

This contribution aims at examining the extent to which patent related indicators are relevant for shedding light on the notion of excellence within knowledge-generating institutions. Traditionally, excellence has been looked upon as the ability to create interesting and valuable new scientific concepts, theories and data. From such a perspective, scientific excellence can be assessed through scientometric measures of publication output and impact. The recent interest in the entrepreneurial phenomenon within knowledge-generating institutes justifies efforts to examine the relevancy of broadening the set of indicators used to assess such institutions into the direction of entrepreneurial excellence. In this paper we will examine the relevancy of using patent data in order to delineate such additional, more entrepreneurial oriented, indicators. The arguments and findings presented in this respect will lead us to a plea for the use of these indicators in a contextualized manner.     

Salvation or damnation?: Religion and correctional ideology

Fundamentalist affiliation and religious beliefs are generally related to more punitive attitudes toward criminals. Fundamentalists also tend to attribute criminality to individual dispositional factors, and in turn, such factors are related to punitiveness. Recently, it has also been found that compassionate dimensions of religion are related to treatment-oriented policies. It is still not clear which dimensions of religion are related to punitive or treatment ideology and what effects religious variables may have when tested against secular concerns about crime and crime attributions. In the present research, we test three models of punitiveness and one model of rehabilitation with demographic, secular, religious, and attributional factors. We found that those for whom religion is salient in their daily lives tend to believe that the death penalty should be reserved for older offenders and that those who believe in a punitive God tend to support harsher punishments.     

Effects of defendant age and juror bias on judgment of culpability: What happens when a juvenile is tried as an adult?

The current study examined the possibility that trying juveniles as adults was prejudicial. One hundred and fifty three undergraduate mock jurors, classified as either prosecution-biased (PB) or defense-biased (DB), participated in the experiment. The jurors were randomly assigned to read a murder trial summary depicting a 19-year-old adult defendant (AD-19), a 16-year-old juvenile tried as an adult (JA-16), or a 13-year-old juvenile tried as an adult (JA-13). Defendant age interacted with juror bias. In the JA-16 condition, compared with defense-biased jurors, prosecution-biased jurors found the defendant guilty more often, had higher confidence in the defendant’s guilt, and set a lower standard of proof. By all appearances, some jurors might lose neutrality when judging juveniles tried as adults.     

The Illusion of Transparency in Negotiations

The authors examined whether negotiators are prone to an illusion of transparency, or the belief that their private thoughts and feelings are more discernible to their negotiation partners than they actually are. In Study One, negotiators who were trying to conceal their preferences thought that their preferences had leaked out more than they actually did. In Study Two, experienced negotiators who were trying to convey information about some of their preferences overestimated their partners' ability to discern them. The results of Study Three rule out the possibility that the findings are simply the result of the curse of knowledge, or the projection of one's own knowledge onto others. Discussion explores how the illusion of transparency might impede negotiators' success.     

A potential metallographic technique for the investigation of pipe bombings

This study was conducted in an attempt to develop a metallographic method for the investigation of pipe bombings. Three common pipe materials, ASTM A53 steel, AISI 304L stainless steel, and 6061-T6 aluminum, were shock-loaded using five high explosives and three propellants. The explosives used were ANFO, Composition C4, C6 detasheet, nitroglycerine-based dynamite, and flake TNT. The propellants used were FFFFg black powder. Red Dot smokeless powder, and Turbo Fuel A. The post-blast microstructure, hardness, and, in the case of 304L, transformed martensite content were examined for each test. The damage done to the microstructure was found to increase with increasing detonation velocity of the explosives and increase in pressure generated by the shock-metal interaction. Material hardness and, in the case of 304L, martensite content showed a sharp increase followed by a plateau as the shock pressure and detonation velocity increased.     

Mobile autopsy teams in the investigation of war crimes in Kosovo 1999.

On request of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the Danish-Swedish forensic teams worked in Kosovo during the summer and the fall of 1999. The teams worked mainly as "mobile teams" at sites with few graves. Only two larger sites were examined. Most of the bodies were buried separately. A few "multiple burial" graves were examined, but no mass graves were encountered. The main purpose of the autopsies was to establish the cause and manner of death. Identification was of less importance, but a majority of the bodies had been identified prior to the autopsy. A total of 308 bodies, mainly males, were examined. The age varied greatly with a mean age of 47 years. The most common cause of death was gun shot wounds and the most common manner of death was homicide.     

The Role of Woman's Explanations for Refusal on Men's Ability to Discriminate Unwanted Sexual Behavior in a Date Rape Scenario

This study examined the impact of types of women's verbal refusals, and the timing of her refusal, on men's discrimination of when a female wants her partner to stop making sexual advances. Male students were randomly assigned to 1 of 6 conditions (Explanations × Intimacy Levels). Before listening to an audiotape of a date rape, participants were told they would be listening to an interaction between a man and a woman who had just returned from a date. They were instructed to indicate when the woman wanted the man to stop making sexual advances by pressing a switch that synchronously stopped a timer (yielding the measure of latency). In the vignette, the woman provided an explanation for not engaging in sexual intercourse on the date either during kissing or when the man attempted to touch her breasts. She offered one of three reasons for refusing his sexual advances; fear of pregnancy, waiting until marriage, too early in the relationship. Results revealed an interaction in which participants in the too early in the relationship explanation at the level of breast contact condition displayed significantly longer latencies than individuals in the other groups. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

The Principle of Full Compensation in Tort Law

According to the principle of full compensation, tort law seeks to put the victim in the position he was in before the tort. This position is generally considered to be the situation where the victim does not suffer any harm at all. We consider an alternative interpretation. If an injurer takes due care, the victim is faced with expected harm. This can be considered the victim's expected harm in the situation he was in before the tort. Thus conceived full compensation requires a negligent injurer to pay damages which bring the (potential) victim ex ante in the same position as the victim was in the case where the (potential) injurer takes due care. We investigate the consequences of this restated negligence rule. For due care levels larger than efficient care, the standard negligent rule may lead to excessive care, whereas the restated negligent rule always leads to efficient care. Furthermore, the activity level under the restated negligent rule is greater than the activity level under the standard negligent rule, which itself is greater than the efficient activity level. Social welfare under the restated negligence rule can either be higher or lower than social welfare under the standard negligence rule.