Violence,Guns, and Suicide in New Orleans: Results from a Qualitative Study of Recent Suicide Decedents

Many Americans own guns to protect themselves against other people, but there is evidence that both victimization and gun access increase suicide risk. We conducted qualitative interviews with informants of 17 suicide cases in New Orleans of the 60 who died between January 2015 and April 2016 to understand the relationship between past trauma, gun access and storage, and suicide. Nine cases had experienced a past trauma, including three who had recently had a family member killed by homicide. Eight died via firearm; of those, seven owned the guns they used to take their lives and stored them locked (but loaded) at home or in their cars. Preventing community violence and addressing its sequelae may be important for reducing suicides. A multi‐pronged strategy consisting of policies, education, and marketing will likely be needed to address the risk of suicide conferred by gun access.     

Parents’ Perspectives on Family‐centered Care in Juvenile Justice Institutions

Family‐centered care during adolescent detention aims to increase parental participation in an attempt to optimize treatment outcomes. However, little is known about parents’ needs in family‐centered care. To fill this gap, we interviewed 19 purposefully selected parents of detained adolescents using a semi‐structured topic list. Although needs differed between parents, they were generally interested in activities that included spending time with their child. It is important for parents to receive timely information about their child's condition and treatment, detention procedures, and activities in the facility. The outcomes demonstrated that parents expected a two‐way communication based on respect and reliability.     

X‐ray Diffraction and Rietveld Refinement in Deferrified Clays for Forensic Science

Soil vestiges might provide information about a crime scene. The Rietveld method with X‐ray diffraction data (RM‐XRD) is a nondestructive technique that makes it possible to characterize minerals present in the soils. Soil clays from the metropolitan region of Curitiba (Brazil) were submitted to DCB treatment and analyzed using XRD with CuK_α radiation in the step‐scan mode (0.02° 2θ/5 s). The GSAS+EXPGUI software was used for RM refinement. The RM‐XRD results, together with the principal component analysis (PCA) (52.6% total variance), showed the kaolinite predominance in most analyzed samples and the highest quartz contents in “site 1.” Higher anatase, and gibbsite and muscovite contents influenced discrimination, mainly in “site 3” and “site 1,” respectively. These results were enough to discriminate clays of four sites and two horizons using a reduced amount of sample showing that the technique can be applied to the investigation into soil vestiges.     

Book reviews

Deane Curtin, Chinnagounders’ Challenge: The Question of Ecological Citizenship. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Jim Yong Kim, et ah, ed., Dying For Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000.

Lester R. Brown, Christopher Flavin, Hilary French, et al., eds., State of the World 1998. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1998.

Margit Mayer and John Ely, eds., The German Greens. Paradox Between Movement and Party. Translated by Michael Schatzschneider. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.     

Le mythe de Cham dans quelques livrets scolaires du Congo belge

The author quotes and briefly analyses a few exerpts taken from textbooks written and printed by Christain missionaries for the Congo primary schools. The Bible story of Cham cursed by his father, told in those texts from which Congolese children learned to read in the first half of the 20th century, stressed the white man’s superiority as coming from God.     

Technology Trade

This study addresses the question of why some countries import more research and development-intensive goods than others. Using a panel data set of 80 countries for the period 1970–1995, results indicate that domestic investment, foreign direct investment and the quality of intellectual property rights systems positively affect technology imports. However, the higher the percentage of the workforce with primary studies, the lower technology imports are. Moreover, intellectual property rights tend to reinforce the positive role played by foreign direct investments in importing technology while the ability of imitation reduces the effect of intellectual property rights.     

Effort,Technology and the Efficiency of Agricultural Cooperatives

The inefficiency of cooperative agriculture relative to private farms is often attributed to difficulties in monitoring or poor incentives. We develop a model to show that, in technologies with numerous sequential steps, even small shortfalls in worker effort can result in large output declines. Using data on cooperative and private farms in El Salvador, we find greater shortfalls in efficiency between cooperatives and private farms, as well as among cooperatives, for coffee, a crop requiring numerous steps in its cultivation, than for maize and sugar, which require fewer steps. Thus the undersupply of effort in cooperatives may be less than differences in productivity suggest, and cooperative agriculture is most likely to be successful where production does not involve many sequential steps.