Energy Crime,Harm, and Problematic State Response in Colorado: A Case of the Fox Guarding the Hen House?

Crime related to energy extraction is an emerging area of interest among green and critical criminologists. This paper contributes to that developing work by examining the political economy of harm and crime associated with the oil and natural gas industry in rural Colorado. Specifically, we examine problematic state regulatory response to citizens’ complaints regarding a range of harms caused by private industry (e.g., water pollution, adverse human health consequences, and domestic livestock death). In this paper, we draw on content analysis of formal complaints filed by citizens to the state, ethnographic work, and intensive interviews with citizens seeking relief from problematic or abusive industry practices. Our analysis illuminates how the state documents these practices, how citizens experience them, and how the state dilutes and deflects the externalities of energy extraction to produce additional harm.     

Academic entrepreneurship,technology transfer and society: where next?

I outline a synthesis of micro and macro levels that attempts to provide a broader conceptualization of academic entrepreneurship and an appreciation of the contextual heterogeneity of academic entrepreneurship and the implications for how it occurs. The micro-level concerns how firms orchestrate their resources and capabilities, specifically knowing where resources come from and how to accumulate, bundle and configure them to generate sustainable returns. At the macro level, I analyse four different dimensions of context: temporal, institutional, social and spatial. Consequently, I argue that there is a need for a reconciliation of utilitarian and education-for-education’s sake perspectives on the role of universities.     

CHINA'S POVERTY ALLEVIATION

正The secret to China’s development is not any particular policy or method, but rather its political economy China has achieved a complete victory in its fight against poverty In December 2020,President Xi Jinping announced that all remaining rural poor population had moved out of poverty under the current standard.     

The Double Delegitimatisation of Julia Gillard: Gender,the Media,and Australian Political Culture

This article explores Australian media coverage of Julia Gillard's leadership. It employs a comparative discourse analysis of the gendered nature of media reporting on her sexism and misogyny speech and eventual demise. The article places these gendered framings within two contexts: that of the more general gendered expectations of the double bind facing all women leaders; and the more specific challenge to Australia's women leaders, posed by exclusivist national identity narratives. These narratives — of mateship, the ANZAC myth, and various apparently ideal‐type masculinities — serve to further disassociate Australian women from positions of national leadership. Together, we argue that the twin constraints of gender expectations and exclusivist national identity narratives amounted to a double delegitimisation of Julia Gillard's leadership, on the basis of her being a woman leader, generally, and an Australian woman leader, specifically.     

Using Fuzzy Rule–Based Systems to Evaluate Overall Financial Performance of Governments: An Enhancement to the Bond Rating Process

Credit ratings remain a key feature of municipal debt management. The primary objective of this article is to develop a new methodology for evaluating the financial performance and creditworthiness of governments and to illustrate this approach for a sample of large American cities. Specifically, we develop a fuzzy rule–based system (FRBS) that uses economic, debt, and other financial information as well as a measure of financial management to produce rankings of city financial performance. The FRBS credit ratings are highly correlated with actual Moody's ratings for these cities. FRBS have the potential of enhancing the rating process by standardizing the information used and encouraging consistent rules about what combinations of inputs result in good, fair, or poor performance.     

Pay to protect: Examining the factors of the use of market-based instruments for local water sustainability

Given the myriad of policy instruments aimed at enhancing water quantity conservation available to municipalities, what drives them to opt for a market-based instrument (MBI)? MBIs can be effective and efficient policy instruments to enhance water quantity conservation, but there is little known about why municipalities utilize them. This study hypothesizes that three contextual elements influence a municipality's use of an MBI: the natural, political, and structural environment. The results from two logistic regression models suggest that in a municipality suffering a higher drought level, both a conservative political environment and operating under a council-manager form of government (with the effect more pronounced under a non-council-manager form) will increase the likelihood that it will use an MBI to address water conservation.     

A Comparison of Four Presumptive Tests for the Detection of Blood on Dark Materials

Detection of blood on dark materials is difficult for crime scene examiners so presumptive tests are used to assist. This study compared the ability of luminol, leuko crystal violet, tetramethylbenzidine, and Combur Test®E to detect whole, diluted blood (1:100) and a key‐shaped blood transfer stain (1:10), on dark cotton sheeting, tea towel, socks, synthetic carpet, and car mats. Powdered bleach was used to evaluate specificity of the blood detection tests. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), and overall misclassification rate (OMR) assessed the quality of the blood tests. Luminol was the preferred test for diluted blood having the highest sensitivity (79%–96%), NPV (66%–93%), and the lowest OMR (3%–15%). Luminol was also found to be most efficient with a testing time on 25 items of 2 h 50 min compared with up to 8 h. Overall, luminol was the most effective method, also providing information on bloodstain patterns.     

‘Working’ the international child protection case: a snapshot of local authorities’ experiences within an evolving legal context

Child protection proceedings often concern children with international connections. In recent years, the courts of England and Wales have handed down a number of significant judgments examining the application of international legal instruments (in particular Brussels IIa) to care proceedings. This article considers the impact of court judgments on the practical ‘working’ by Local Authorities of international child protection cases. A case study was conducted, oriented by socio-legal theory, consisting of a small number of qualitative interviews with Local Authority lawyers and social workers. The article concludes that some judgments have acted as a catalyst to change working practices for Local Authorities. However, international child protection cases present a variety of challenges for Local Authorities, and judgments provide an imperfect site for the provision of procedural and substantive guidance in this complex area. Further, there was often a tension between the need to conscientiously adhere to such guidance, and the welfare needs of the children with whom the Local Authority was concerned.