Infection Risk From Conducted Electrical Weapon Probes: What Do We Know?

Concern has been raised over the infection risk of the TASER electrical weapon since the probes penetrate the skin. The manufacturing process produces unsterilized probes with a 5% rate of Staphylococcus aureus contamination. Voluntary recipients (n = 208) of probe exposures were surveyed and there were no self‐observations of infection. With over 3.3 million probe landings, there have been 10 case reports of penetrations of sensitive tissue with no reported infections. The electrical field was modeled and found that the electrical pulses generate a field of over 1200 V/mm on the dart portion. This is sufficient to sterilize the dart via electroporation. Electrical weapon probes appear to have a very low (possibly zero) rate of infection. The factors leading to this low infection rate appear to be a manufacturing process producing a low rate of bacterial contamination and the pulses sterilizing the dart via electroporation.     

Mitigating the negative effects of emotional labor: A study of disaster response and recovery workers after the 2010 Haiti earthquake

One of the most pressing governance challenges around the globe is managing disasters and their underlying risk factors. Little is known about effective strategies to minimize burnout and posttraumatic stress disorder among practitioners involved in addressing this challenge, especially in countries that rely mainly on international aid agencies for the delivery of basic services to their citizens. This article draws on the emotional labor literature to identify routes addressing the negative consequences of doing response and recovery work in postdisaster contexts. Based primarily on surveys and interviews with response and recovery workers involved after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, it advances and extends previous emotional labor theory on the mitigating factors of service workers' burnout. It points to the importance of autonomy and training as well as five coping mechanisms: relying on informal support, utilizing humor, leaving work at work, decompressing alone, and rotating job positions.     

A proposed method for the identification of race in sub-adult skeletons: a geometric morphometric analysis of mandibular morphology

The identification of biological race (ancestry) in skeletal material is an important aspect of forensic investigations. While techniques for race determination are well established for adult skeletons, identification of race in sub-adult specimens has not been widely addressed. The present study investigates racial differences in the mandibular morphology of sub-adult specimens using geometric morphometric analyses. One hundred and seventy-four mandibles from five morphologically distinct samples were digitized and subjected to general Procrustes analysis. Results showed significant morphological differences between the samples and obtained cross-validation results of over 70% accuracy in identification of unknown individuals using the complete mandible. It is suggested that these techniques could provide a method for the identification of race in sub-adult individuals.     

The silence of the tapes

He is author of The challenge of the Borderline Patient;and The Reality of Mental Illness(with Martin Roth). His research interests include diagnostic and therapeutic issues of personality disorders, adjustment problems of Southeast Asian refugees, and comparisons of self-injurious behaviors in medieval Europe and contemporary society.     

Russian defense spending after 2010: the interplay of personal,domestic, and foreign policy interests

Since 2010, Russia’s defense spending has seen an average annual real growth of 10%, causing a profound shift in the composition of government expenditure. This article examines the formal and informal processes through which Russia’s level of defense spending is determined and identifies personal, domestic, and foreign policy interests behind the rise in defense expenditures. Drawing on a combination of elite interviews and document and news analyses, I argue that domestic political and socioeconomic factors are at least as important as geopolitical and security ones in explaining Russia’s decision to push defense to the forefront of the political agenda. The findings suggest that high levels of defense spending may be politically sustainable in Russia, at least in the medium term, even though it comes at the cost of other public goods.     

Performance Management Routines That Work? An Early Assessment of the GPRA Modernization Act

The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993 provided a well‐studied framework for U.S. federal performance management initiatives. In the aftermath of the update of GPRA in 2010 with the GPRA Modernization Act, the authors offer the first systematic scholarly assessment of the new legislation. Managerial use of performance data was an explicit goal of the Modernization Act, an objective that eluded prior federal reforms. The Modernization Act established a new series of performance routines to encourage performance information use. The analysis shows that as federal managers experience those routines, they are more likely to report using performance data to make decisions. Specifically, routines centered on the pursuit of cross‐agency priority goals, the prioritization of a small number of agency goals, and data‐driven reviews are all associated with higher rates of performance information use. The authors also find that managers in better‐run data‐driven reviews report greater use of performance data.     

The Design and Practice of Integrating Evidence: Connecting Performance Management with Program Evaluation

In recent decades, governments have invested in the creation of two forms of knowledge production about government performance: program evaluations and performance management. Prior research has noted tensions between these two approaches and the potential for complementarities when they are aligned. This article offers empirical evidence on how program evaluations connect with performance management in the U.S. federal government in 2000 and 2013. In the later time period, there is an interactive effect between the two approaches, which, the authors argue, reflects deliberate efforts by the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations to build closer connections between program evaluation and performance management. Drawing on the 2013 data, the authors offer evidence that how evaluations are implemented matters and that evaluations facilitate performance information use by reducing the causal uncertainty that managers face as they try to make sense of what performance data mean.