VICTORIA

The Victorian Liberal Premier, Richard Hamer, in adjourning the 1980 parliamentary session with the traditional “Christmas felicitations”, made special reference to the record number of sitting days and the longer daily average of sitting hours achieved. Labor Opposition Leader Frank Wilkes in turn drew attention to the total of 126 bills introduced during the spring session, of which 101 had been instigated by the government and 25 by private members. Such an arduous and concentrated parliamentary schedule has obvious policy implications, but also prompts a query about its administrative consequences. To what extent was the mass of legislation dealt with by the last Victorian State parliament directed towards administrative ends as well as to the Liberal government's more obvious political goals?     

Frontière Dépassée,Frontière Recomposée

La notion de frontière est au c?ur d’une ambivalence entre son caractère délimitateur, son rôle de contour spatial et la contestation des séparations qu’elle opère. La frontière juridico-politique, limite de systèmes, est soumise à de profonds bouleversements. Dès lors, elle fait l’objet d’une nouvelle acception et devient le lieu d’une coopération entre des acteurs soucieux d’un développement harmonieux et d’un retour à la normalité au bénéfice d’une nouvelle dimension de l’espace: le transfrontalier. Comment le droit a t-il accueilli ces évolutions? Quelle définition s’impose au juriste devant la notion de frontière?     

Evaluating the Short-Run Benefits of Six Department of Energy R&;D Projects

This paper evaluates the short-run benefits of research and development (R&D) projects funded by the Automotive Lightweighting Materials (ALM) Program of the Office of FreedomCAR and Vehicle Technologies of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The six ALM projects evaluated—using qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods—yielded numerous benefits in the short-run. From the qualitative assessment, all met their technical goals, increased intellectual knowledge among the research teams, and led to increased collaboration among DOE, the auto industry, its suppliers, and national laboratories. Moreover, U.S. competitiveness appeared to have increased as a result of each R&D effort. One interesting finding, however, is that most of the participants indicated their firms would not have engaged in the research efforts without DOE funding. If they had engaged in the effort, it would have been with considerably less person time and financial commitment. With respect to quantitative measures, several graduate students were supported by the projects and numerous publications and presentations resulted, although these metrics varied across the ALM R&D projects.     

Undiagnosed, untreated acute promyelocytic leukemia presenting as a suspicious sudden death

Acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) is a subtype of acute myelogenous leukemia frequently associated with clotting abnormalities and severe hemorrhagic diathesis. The disease is associated with a high incidence of early fatal hemorrhage. We report the sudden death of a 40-year-old male without significant medical history in which foul play had been initially suspected. A thorough postmortem investigation performed on the decedent lead to the diagnosis of APL. Cause of death was a cerebellar hematoma. Underlying APL should be considered in the differential diagnosis when unexplained bleeding is encountered in a decedent. This case emphasizes the value of routinely collecting bone marrow during an autopsy to enable accurate testing and diagnosis.     

Associative Learning of Nasonia vitripennis Walker (Hymenoptera:Pteromalidae) to Methyldisulfanylmethane

Traditional methods of volatile detection used by police typically consist of reliance on canine olfaction. However, dogs have some limitations such as cost of training and time of conditioning. The possibility of using parasitic wasps for detecting explosives and narcotics has been developed. Moreover, wasps are cheap to produce and can be conditioned with impressive speed for a specific chemical detection task. We examined the ability of Nasonia vitripennis Walker to learn and respond to methyldisulfanylmethane (DMDS), a volatile discriminator of cadaver. The training aimed to form an association between an unconditioned stimulus (pupae) and the conditioned stimulus (odor source). After the training, the time spent by conditioned wasps in the DMDS chamber was measured. Statistical analysis showed that the increasing concentrations involved an increase in the time spent in the chamber containing DMDS. This study indicates that N. vitripennis can respond to DMDS, which provide further support for its development as a biological sensor.