Extensive Petechiae in Attempted Self-Strangulation

Abstract:  A 29-year-old Korean man reported to have been robbed, bound, and gagged by a stranger in his apartment. Clinical findings included extensive petechiae to his face and tramline patterned abrasions and ligature furrows to his neck and face as well as his wrists. Initially, no other leads in the investigation existed and a robbery was assumed to have taken place. The man eventually confessed to fabricating the story and to having self-induced the ligature marks by subluxating his jaw at the temporomandibular joint and hooking the rope closest to the back of his neck on the corner of table. The man demonstrated this unsuspected ability to law enforcement officers. As a motive for his unconventional behavior, he confessed to engaging in autoaggressive behavior as punishment for "losing face" after his ex-girlfriend terminated her pregnancy. This case demonstrates that petechiae due to neck compression also may occur in the living and are due to vascular compression and not lethal hypoxia.     

The precarious practice of forensic psychiatric risk assessments

The development of forensic psychiatric risk assessments is discussed from a clinical point of view using the example of Sweden. A central task in forensic psychiatry has traditionally been to identify dangerous, mentally disordered subjects considered to be prone to commit violent acts. Over time, “dangerousness” has been reworded into “risk”. Nevertheless, such assessments have generally been based on the psychiatric factors characterising the individual patient, while group interaction, situational factors, or social and cultural circumstances, such as the availability of alcohol and drugs, have been largely overlooked. That risk assessments have a focused on people with a diagnosis of “mental disorder” and been used as grounds for coercive measures and integrity violations has somehow been accepted as a matter of course in the public and political debate. Even the basic question whether offenders with a mental disorder are really more prone to criminal recidivism than other offenders seems to have been treated light-handedly and dealt with merely by epidemiological comparisons between groups of persons with broad ranges of psychosocial vulnerability and the general population. Legal texts, instructions and guidelines from the authorities in charge are often vague and general, while actors in the judicial system seem to put their trust in psychiatric opinions. The exchange of professional opinions, general public expectations, and judicial decision processes poses a huge risk for misunderstandings based on divergent expectations and uses of terminology.     

Correction to: Promoting academic engagement: university context and individual characteristics

The Journal of Technology Transfer - The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The corresponding author’s name was incorrect. The given name and family name were...     

Palestine at the end of the state-building process: Technical achievements,political failures

More than two decades of Palestinian state-building have produced neither peace nor a state. In fact, the Palestinians are seemingly further away from statehood today than at any point since the state-building process began in the mid-90s, despite the fact that the West Bank’s institutions now perform, according to the UN, the EU, the World Bank and IMF, above the threshold for what is expected of a state. In this situation – with the Palestinians technically ready for statehood and large parts of Europe and the U.S. not politically ready to recognize Palestine – it is unclear what strategic objectives the internationally supported state-building process now can achieve in the Palestinian territories, except for upholding the status quo.     

Outward Foreign Direct Investment,Exporting and Firm-Level Performance in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

We consider the relationship between how a firm serves foreign markets and performance, using survey data on manufacturing and services firms for African countries. Results for manufacturing industries indicate a clear productivity ordering with firms undertaking outward Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) performing best, followed by exporters and domestically oriented firms. Results for services firms are more nuanced, indicating that while exporters and firms undertaking outward FDI are more productive than domestically oriented firms, there is no significant difference in productivity between these two types of firms (some evidence suggests that the productivity of exporters is larger than that for firms undertaking outward FDI).     

Political Trust and the Local Business Climate: Evidence from Sweden

A re‐analysis of three Swedish studies of political trust at local level shows that the extent to which citizens trust the system of democracy in municipalities correlates strongly with how the employers in that area assess the state of the local business climate. This article deals with the question of how this can be understood. Three sets of underlying explanations are tested: social capital theory, a theory of local well‐being and political‐institutional conditions. The empirical analysis shows that only the theory of local well‐being can explain consistently why political trust and a flourishing local business climate occur in concert. The study emphasises the need to expand research on political trust to also take into account the role played by the business climate. This has been completely ignored in previous research on political trust. Such knowledge would be highly relevant to local policy making. In order to capture the specific mechanisms at work, qualitative case studies of municipalities are suggested as the next step of research.     

Hot Cognition in Investigative Judgments: The Differential Influence of Anger and Sadness

The authors predicted that the cognitive appraisal tendencies associated with sadness and anger would exert different influences on investigators' crime-related judgments. Supporting evidence was found in an experiment with 61 experienced criminal investigators. First, when judging the reliability of a witness statement, sad participants relied on their perception of both witness and situational variables, whereas angry participants relied only on their perception of witness variables. This corresponds to the emphasis placed on situational and individual control in the appraisals associated with sadness and anger, respectively. Second, when making judgments of the case, sad participants were sensitive to the consistency of a witness statement with the central hypothesis of the investigation, indicating substantive processing, whereas angry participants were unaffected by statement-hypothesis consistency, indicating heuristic processing. The findings suggest that the process of reliability assessment can be better understood by consulting theories of attribution and information processing.     

Firms’ rationales for interaction with research universities and the principles for public co-funding

R&D managers at 50 firms who have formal relations with two research universities in Stockholm are interviewed about their rationales for collaboration. Drawing on this material, a distinctive typology of rationales for establishing cooperative relations is presented. While the typology demonstrates a considerable breadth of interaction rationales, rationales related to innovation, in terms of invented or improved products or processes, are found to be the main drivers for interaction. Based on this framework, we analyse which rationales for interaction are consistent with public rationales for supporting university-industry relationships. Public co-funding that allow firms to influence (part of) the academic agenda is identified as a particularly interesting case that requires further theoretical attention.