Counterproliferation Bargaining with the United States: China and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons

This article analyzes China’s use of issue-linkage strategies in its approach to nuclear proliferation. It highlights that China has used its ties to nuclear proliferators as a bargaining chip vis-a-vis the United States. The United States is dependent on Chinese cooperation to secure nonproliferation objectives such as a non-nuclear Iran, and China has used this dependency to extract side-payments for its cooperation. Moreover, Beijing has used non-cooperation on nuclear proliferation as retaliation when the US has hurt its interests in unrelated policy areas, such as through arms sales to Taiwan. In contrast with past studies, the article claims that China’s approach to nonproliferation remains partly transactional to this day.     

PryJector: a device for in situ visualization of chemical and physical property distributions on surfaces using projection and hyperspectral imaging

Traditional forensic methods that highlight the spatial distribution of properties such as blood and fingerprints have two main disadvantages: they often apply chemicals that may influence further analyses, and they cannot easily be modified to search for new compounds/properties. A new instrument (called PryJector) avoids these problems by dynamically projecting back onto the surface under study spatially distributed information of compounds/properties (chemical images) obtained from multivariate analysis of hyperspectral images. Selectivity to target compounds/properties is ensured by multivariate modeling which makes the instrument much more flexible compared to traditional methods. The functionality of the PryJector is demonstrated in an application related to the detection of counterfeit pharmaceuticals where compounds otherwise indistinguishable to the human eye are made clearly visible by projection of false-colored chemical images. The PryJector is shown to be a noninvasive and very flexible instrument for highlighting spatial distributions of various compounds/properties.     

Social Democratic parties as buffers against the extreme right: the case of Belgium

While the Vlaams Blok (currently Vlaams Belang) became one of the most successful and electorally durable extreme-right parties in Europe in the 1990s, the francophone Front National has yet to achieve a stable basis of support. We argue that an important reason for this divergence has been the behaviour of Social Democratic parties in the two regions of Belgium. In Wallonia, the Parti Socialiste (PS) held onto its traditional electorate through both distributing material benefits and by keeping traditional economic themes, or issues that it ‘owns’, high on the political agenda. The SP (currently SP.A) in Flanders has done less well on both counts. Since Social Democratic parties across Western Europe have lost voters to the extreme right, our comparison suggests that their behaviour is an important variable in understanding cross-national variation in the extreme-right's success.     

Insincere voting under the successive procedure

Most European parliaments use the successive procedure to reach decisions. This means that a parliament votes feasible alternatives one-by-one in a pre-determined order until one of them obtains a majority of votes. The paper has two objectives. First, I sketch a simple method making it easy to uncover instances of successful insincere voting under the successive procedure. Second, by focusing on data from one national assembly consistently using this procedure, I demonstrate that insincere or strategic voting is very rare. The finding does not indicate that politicians necessarily behave in a non-strategic or unsophisticated manner. It means only that strategic maneuvers may take place at earlier stages of the decision-making process, for example, in designing the voting agenda.     

Constitutional verbosity and social trust

A common argument in the trust literature is that high-trust cultures allow efficient commercial contracts to be shorter, covering fewer contingencies. We take this idea to the topic of social contracts. Specifically, we ask whether social trust affects the length and detail of constitutions. Cross-country estimates suggest that national trust levels are indeed robustly and negatively associated with the length of countries’ constitutions.     

The spirits of capitalism and socialism

The World Values Survey contains an item on ownership which is polled 200 times in 92?countries at the four waves of 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005. These polls are developed into the CS-score that measures the aggregate mass support for capitalism and socialism. Four hypotheses are advanced and tested to explain the wide variation in the 200 CS-scores. It is due to: the cross-country distribution of income, and consequently the West stands out as the most capitalist-minded area of the world; institutions of the country such as legal quality; the left-right dimension in politics; and cultural differences.     

Insomnia, nightmare frequency, and nightmare distress in victims of sexual abuse: the role of perceived social support and abuse characteristics

In this study of victims of sexual abuse, the aim was to investigate the role of perceived social support and abuse characteristics in self-reported insomnia, nightmare frequency, and nightmare distress. Four hundred sixty Norwegian victims of sexual abuse completed a questionnaire assessing perceived social support, abuse characteristics, insomnia, nightmare frequency, and nightmare distress. Results show that higher levels of perceived social support were related to lower scores on all symptom outcome measures. Abuse involving oral, genital, or anal penetration was related to more insomnia symptoms. Longer duration of abuse and threatening conducted by the perpetrator were related to higher nightmare frequency, while threats and abuse involving penetration were related to higher degrees of distress associated with nightmares. In conclusion, the present study provides preliminary data indicating that perceived social support may affect the nature of sleep difficulties in sexual abuse victims. Also, more severe forms of sexual abuse are related to higher levels of sleep difficulties.     

A new system for computer aided dental identification in mass disasters

In recent years, several computer programs for dental identification in mass disasters have been developed. Unfortunately, it may be difficult to get access to such programs. The Norwegian police presently utilizes a text retrieval program, NOVA¹STATUS, for detection work. This program is based on the British STATUS ONE program, and it enables the user to find from a large pool of postmortem dental registration one or several sets containing specific information about one tooth or several teeth. The complete relevant set(s) can be displayed for visual examination and comparison. A coding system for dental information has been developed as well as a system for interrogating the computer. This system and its efficiency have been tested on a simulated small scale disaster where various well-known difficulties in dental identification were included.