Russia and Europe

For the first time, in Russia there is no established ideology, there is no censorship and there is no state terror. Lack of land reform is changing Russian agriculture into a ‘garden plot economy’. Rising mortality and a plummeting birth‐rate depict a dramatic demographic trend. The border between the EU and Russia delineates an epidemic faultline. Russia faces de‐industrialisation and the collapse of the infrastructure, and devolution of power faces the choice between decentralisation by design or disintegration by default. A normative divide is opening up between Russia and future EU members, the Baltic States and Poland. The West can influence developments in Russia only to a limited degree.     

DVPW-Mitteilungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

A forensic international market survey of condom lubricants and personal hygiene products using ATR-FTIR coupled to chemometrics

Condom residues may be encountered in forensic investigations as traces in sexual assault or rape cases. Casework studies have shown the value of distinguishing condom residues from other types of personal products used by women. However, up to now, there has been no investigation of their chemical variability within an international context. This work employed attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy with chemometrics to provide objective characterisation of condom lubricants and personal hygiene products from the international market. 166 samples were obtained covering five major classes of products likely to be used by women. Principal component analysis distinguished most major classes based on their spectral profiles, with subsequent support vector machine models yielding discrimination accuracies over 90%. A two-step approach was subsequently developed and enabled both classification and a discrimination accuracy of 100%. This could provide greater confidence in chemical discrimination of residues from these products when conducting investigations and help assess the origin of the chemical profile obtained. Further testing using three validation sets produced an identification accuracy of 100% for generic classes, which may allow investigative leads to be more readily obtained from recovered evidence.     

Les fonctionnaires face au développement de la performance de l'action publique en France

Important changes are currently taking place within the French civil service, and civil servants now have to adapt to the performance requirements. To encourage profile diversity, the competitive entrance examinations for applicants to the French civil service have been redesigned. Furthermore, the development of new procedures for assessing civil servants has led to question the old methods used until recently. Thus, new measures for rating civil servants have now been implemented, with a focus on organizing advancement and promotion. This reform has also had an impact on the career management of civil servants, with the development of a performance‐based compensation system. Finally, civil servant mobility within the civil service, considered to be one of the levers of the government reform process, is now also being encouraged. Efforts must be focused on increasing the effectiveness of human resources management in public administrations in order to deliver high‐quality public service at the lowest possible cost.     

Suicidality in male prisoners: influence of childhood adversity mediated by dimensions of personality

This study aims to study the influence of childhood adversity on suicidal behavior in male prisoners. Including a random sample of 899 male prisoners (French National Mental Health Prison Survey, 2003), this paper studied suicidal ideations and suicide attempts using MINI criteria, and personality using Temperament and Character Inventory. Risk factors of suicidality were examined, and structural equations studied the influence of childhood trauma on suicidality, mediated by personality dimensions. The prisoners reported high levels of childhood adversity. More than a third reported recent suicidal ideations. Childhood adversity and dimensions of personality were associated with suicidality. Structural equations showed that childhood adversity was positively associated with suicidality, mediated by poor dimensions of character (affective stability, self-cooperativeness, and self-transcendence). In conclusion, these results confirm the importance of screening and treatment of childhood trauma among male prisoners. They suggest the importance to study dimensions of personality and tailor treatment to specific needs.     

Forensic mental health assessment in France: Recommendations for quality improvement

The quality of forensic mental health assessment has been a growing concern in various countries on both sides of the Atlantic, but the legal systems are not always comparable and some aspects of forensic assessment are specific to a given country. This paper describes the legal context of forensic psychological assessment in France (i.e. pre-trial investigation phase entrusted to a judge, with mental health assessment performed by preselected professionals called “experts” in French), its advantages and its pitfalls. Forensic psychiatric or psychological assessment is often an essential and decisive element in criminal cases, but since a judiciary scandal which was made public in 2005 (the Outreau case) there has been increasing criticism from the public and the legal profession regarding the reliability of clinical conclusions. Several academic studies and a parliamentary report have highlighted various faulty aspects in both the judiciary process and the mental health assessments. The heterogeneity of expert practices in France appears to be mainly related to a lack of consensus on several core notions such as mental health diagnosis or assessment methods, poor working conditions, lack of specialized training, and insufficient familiarity with the Code of Ethics. In this article we describe and analyze the French practice of forensic psychologists and psychiatrists in criminal cases and propose steps that could be taken to improve its quality, such as setting up specialized training courses, enforcing the Code of Ethics for psychologists, and calling for consensus on diagnostic and assessment methods.     

Magister- en doktorale navorsing — Departement Kommunikasiekunde,Unisa, 1991/92

SUMMARY

The visual representation of meaning is an extremely complex activity in computer system design. Apart from a few simple guidelines for screen design, little attention is being paid to the visual construction of meaning by means of illustrations, diagrams, symbols, etc. Also no widely agreed set of icons or symbols exist for use by system designers. Nor are there any proven procedures to improve the effectiveness of screen designs. Current design practices fail to address the underlying problem of the structural analysis of images and the communication of meaning.

This dissertation therefore investigates the nature of visual literacy in computer applications and offers a paradigmatic approach to the analysis and design of computer images as a method to increase the probability that the user will receive and interpret the intended message accurately. The proposed model includes taxonomies of the structure and organisation of visual images and a set of evaluation criteria.